Irene Pepperberg
Dr. Irene Pepperberg is an adjunct associate professor at the Dept. of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
She is also a lecturer and research associate at Harvard University, in Cambridge, MA.
Short CV:
Pepperberg received her SB from MIT and MA and Ph.D. from Harvard. She is currently a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University's Psychology Department. She has been a visiting associate professor at MIT's Media Lab, later accepting a research scientist position there, leaving a tenured professorship at the University of Arizona. She has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, was an alternate for the Cattell Award for Psychology, won the 2000 Selby Fellowship (Australian Academy of Sciences), won the 2005 Frank Beach Award for best paper in comparative psychology, was nominated for the 2000 Weizmann, L'Oreal, and Grawemeyer Awards, the 2001 Quest Award (Animal Behavior Society) and was renominated for the 2001 L'Oreal Award.
She has been nominated for the Hebb Award (Division 6 of the American Psychological Association). She has also received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim and Whitehall Foundations, numerous grants from NSF, and teaching awards from Harvard and the University of Arizona.
Her book, The Alex Studies, describing over 20 years of peer-reviewed experiments on Grey parrots, received favorable mention from publications as diverse as the New York Times and Science. Her memoir, Alex & Me, was a New York Times bestseller. She has presented her findings nationally and internationally at universities and scientific congresses, often as a keynote or plenary speaker, and has published numerous journal articles, reviews, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Ornithologists' Union, AAAS, the Eastern Psychological Association, and presently serves as consulting editor for four journals.
Abstract:
A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) had been taught, in ways that differed considerably from those used for children, to use English labels to quantify 6 item sets (including heterogeneous subsets; Pepperberg, 1994) and to label the corresponding Arabic numerals appropriately; without training he inferred the relationship between the numerals and the sets of objects (Pepperberg, 2006b). He was then trained to label vocally the Arabic numerals 7 and 8 and to order these Arabic numerals with respect to the numeral 6. He was subsequently tested as to whether he, like children, could infer the ordinality of the numerals 7 and 8 with respect to untrained numerals and the appropriate label use for collections of seven and eight items. His results demonstrate his capacity to build an exact symbolic integer system in a way more like children than nonhuman primates who also are numerate.
More information:
The Alex Foundation
