Parrots have evolved a primate-like telencephalic-midbrain-cerebellar circuit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is widely accepted that parrots show remarkable cognitive abilities. In mammals, the evolution of complex cognitive abilities is associated with increases in the size of the telencephalon and cerebellum as well as the pontine nuclei, which connect these two regions. Parrots have relatively large telencephalons that rival those of primates, but whether there are also evolutionary changes in their telencephalon-cerebellar relay nuclei is unknown. Like mammals, birds have two brainstem pontine nuclei that project to the cerebellum and receive projections from the telencephalon. Unlike mammals, birds also have a pretectal nucleus that connects the telencephalon with the cerebellum: the medial spiriform nucleus (SpM). We found that SpM, but not the pontine nuclei, is greatly enlarged in parrots and its relative size significantly correlated with the relative size of the telencephalon across all birds. This suggests that the telencephalon-SpM-cerebellar pathway of birds may play an analogous role to cortico-ponto-cerebellar pathways of mammals in controlling fine motor skills and complex cognitive processes. We conclude that SpM is key to understanding the role of telencephalon-cerebellar pathways in the evolution of complex cognitive abilities in birds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".