Ellie Talks About the Weather: Toward Evaluating the Expressive and Enrichment Potential of a Tablet-Based Speech Board in a Single Goffin’s Cockatoo

Jennifer Cunha, Corinne C Renguette, Nikhil Singh, Lily Stella, Megan McMahon, Hao Jin, and Kleinberger, Rebecca, Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2024, PDF, DOI

🏅 Honors: Featured in The New York Times

ABSTRACT

Augmentative and alternative communication devices (AACs) are designed to assist humans with complex communication needs. Recently, AAC use has been reported in non-human animals. Such tools may potentially provide enrichment and increase interspecies connection. However, there is no evaluation framework and little data available to assess AAC potential. Here, we examine seven months of a single parrot’s sustained use of a tablet-based AAC totaling 129 sessions within 190 days. After devising a coding schema, we propose a framework to explore the expressive potential and enrichment value for the parrot. Our results suggest that the choice of destination words cannot be simply explained based on random selection or icon location alone, and 92% of corroborable selections are validated by behaviors. The parrot interactions also appear significantly skewed toward social and cognitive enrichment. This work is a first step toward assessment of AAC use for parrot enrichment.