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Record W2194437339 · doi:10.1177/147470490900700105

Do Birds Experience Sensory Pleasure?

2009· article· en· W2194437339 on OpenAlexaff
Michel Cabanac

Bibliographic record

VenueEvolutionary Psychology · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicOlfactory and Sensory Function Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversité Laval
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPleasureAffectionPsychologyVocabularyLinguisticsPhilosophySocial psychologyNeuroscience

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To answer the question of whether sensory pleasure exists in birds, I trained an African-gray parrot (Psittacus erythacus) named Aristote to speak. Stage 1 of the study consisted in gaining Aristote's affection. In Stage 2 Aristote was taught to speak, following Irene Pepperberg's triangular method: another person and I would talk together and look at Aristote only when it used understandable French words. Thus Aristote learned to say a few words for obtaining toys or getting my attention; e.g. “donne bouchon” (give cork) or “donne gratte” (give scratch/tickle), with the appropriate reward. In Stage 3, the word bon (good) was added to the short list of words used by Aristote. I said “bon” when giving Aristote the stimuli it requested and which would, presumably, be pleasurable; e.g. gratte bon. Aristote started to use short sentences such as “yaourt bon” (good yogurt). Eventually, Aristote transferred the word bon to new stimuli such as raisin (grape), an association I myself had never made. Such a use of vocabulary, and moreover its transfer, likely shows that this bird experienced sensory pleasure.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.003
Threshold uncertainty score0.010

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.194
GPT teacher head0.355
Teacher spread0.162 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations12
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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