![]() ![]() Most other "dancing" animals- even dog dancing champions-are really just responding to training and not spontaneously busting a move. Patel says they are currently analyzing data from an experiment designed to find out whether the same is true of Snowball.Dancing seems like a decidedly human activity-it requires the technology to produce music, innate rhythm and an ability to respond to music. People more often dance with other people than they do alone. The researchers propose that the reason humans and parrots share a natural ability to dance may arise from the convergence of five traits: (1) vocal learning, (2) the capacity for nonverbal movement imitation, (3) a tendency to form long-term social bonds, (4) the ability to learn complex sequences of actions, and (5) attentiveness to communicative movements.įor humans, dancing is a form of social interaction. Snowball isn't the first parrot to move to the music, but there has been uncertainty about how such moves are acquired. Each time he heard a particular tune he danced a little differently, a sign of flexibility and perhaps even creativity. Unlike the way humans normally dance, Snowball tended to dance in snippets of about three or four seconds. He bobs, swings, and circles his head around in several different ways, sometimes in coordination with foot lifts or other movements. The movements of interest were clearly intentional, but they weren't an efficient means for Snowball to achieve any plausible external goal.Īll told, the video captured Snowball completing a diverse repertoire of 14 dance movements and two composite movements. She focused on each "dance movement" or sequence of repeated movements. Joanne Jao Keehn, a cognitive neuroscientist and a classically and contemporarily trained dancer, used frame-by-frame analysis with the audio muted. To analyze Snowball's movements, the study's first author R. During filming, Schulz was in the room shouting an occasional "Good boy." But Snowball was the only one in the room dancing. ![]() To quantify Snowball's movement diversity, Patel's team filmed Snowball grooving to two classic hits of the eighties: "Another One Bites the Dust" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." They played each of the tunes for him three times for a total of 23 minutes.Īt the time, Snowball was 12 years old and had not danced to those songs with anyone other than his owner. This gave the researchers the chance to study another potential similarity between Snowball's movements and human dancing: diversity in the movements and body parts used when responding to music. Soon after that study, Snowball's owner and an author on the new paper, Irena Schulz, noticed that Snowball was making movements to music she hadn't seen before. That was notable in part because dancing is a natural ability in humans that's absent in other primates. Patel's earlier study, also published in Current Biology, confirmed that Snowball could move to the beat. "What's most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to music," says senior author Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University and Harvard University, noting that Snowball developed those moves - much richer than the head bobbing and foot lifting they'd studied before - without any training. It suggests that dancing to music isn't an arbitrary product of human culture but a response to music that arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in animal brains, the researchers say. The finding is more than an entertaining novelty act.
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