Patterned-string tasks: relation between fine motor skills and visual-spatial abilities in parrots.

Patterned-string tasks: relation between fine motor skills and visual-spatial abilities in parrots.

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String-pulling coq-clear 100 ubiquinol and patterned-string tasks are often used to analyse perceptual and cognitive abilities in animals.In addition, the paradigm can be used to test the interrelation between visual-spatial and motor performance.Two Australian parrot species, the galah (Eolophus roseicapilla) and the cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus), forage on the ground, but only the galah uses its feet to manipulate food.

I used a set of string pulling and patterned-string tasks to test whether usage of the feet during foraging is a prerequisite for solving the vertical string pulling problem.Indeed, the two species used techniques that clearly differed in the extent of beak-foot coordination but did not differ in terms of their success in solving the string pulling task.However, when the visual-spatial skills of the subjects were tested, the galahs outperformed the cockatiels.

This supports the hypothesis that the fine motor skills needed for advanced beak-foot coordination may be interrelated with certain visual-spatial abilities needed here for solving patterned-string tasks.This pattern was also found within each of the two species on the individual level: higher motor abilities positively correlated with performance in patterned-string tasks.This is the first evidence of an interrelation between visual-spatial and motor abilities in non-mammalian animals.