´óÏó´«Ã½

Parrots are known for being pretty clever birds, they're able to interact with people and some species can even mimic what humans say!

Experiments carried out by researchers at top American college, Harvard, suggest the colourful birds might be even cleverer than first thought.

The researchers took 21 adults who were all Harvard students, 21 children between the ages of six and eight and an African grey parrot called Griffin. Each person (or bird!) got the chance to take part in a simple game.

A number of small brightly coloured pom-poms were placed under identical cups which were shuffled. Each participant was then shown a pom-pom and they had to work out which cup the matching coloured pom-pom was under.

The game was repeated with two, three and even four different coloured pom-poms and the position of each of the cups was swapped between zero to four times during each of the games.

The aim of the exercise was to test how good the brain is at holding on to information about items that are no longer visible and later updating this with new information, like a change in location.

It required each participant to pay careful attention in order to keep track of which pom-pom was under which cup. Griffin and the 21 adults took part in 120 rounds of the game, while the children took part in 36.

So what were the final results? Well, Griffin the parrot managed to outperform the children across all levels levels of difficulty for the experiment and he performed either as well or slightly better than the adults during 12 of the 14 trials!

"Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That's pretty freaking awesome," said Hrag Pailian who led the experiment.

Griffin has taken part in lots of brain focused tests before and he's proven himself to be just as intelligent as a six to eight-year-old human. However, this was the first time his intelligence had been measured against that of adults.

Despite the parrot's remarkable abilities, the final two tests were more of a challenge for him and there was a bit of a dip in his performance. The researchers weren't able to figure out exactly why Griffin struggled with the later tests, but they think it might have something to do with how human intelligence works.

How do you think you would have done in this experiment? Do you reckon you're smarter than a parrot? Let us know in the comments!