https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:2413 'Do I know you?' Categorizing individuals on the basis of familiarity in kea (Nestor notabilis) Suwandschieff, Elisabeth Elisabeth Suwandschieff 0000-0002-7137-7978 University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Schwing, Raoul Raoul Schwing 0000-0003-4663-8432 University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Kreuzer, Lena Lena Kreuzer University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Mundry, Roger Roger Mundry University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna / Leibniz Institute for Primate Research / Georg-August-University Göttingen / Kull, Kristina Kristina Kull 0000-0003-1305-2769 University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna / University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna Royal Society Publishing text eng Categorizing individuals on the basis of familiarity is an adaptive way of dealing with the complexity of the social environment. It requires the use of conceptual familiarity and is considered higher order learning. Although, it is common among many species, ecological need might require and facilitate individual differentiation among heterospecifics. This may be true for laboratory populations just as much as for domesticated species and those that live in urban contexts. However, with the exception of a few studies, populations of laboratory animals have generally been given less attention. The study at hand, therefore, addressed the question whether a laboratory population of kea parrots (Nestor notabilis) were able to apply the concept of familiarity to differentiate between human faces in a two-choice discrimination task on the touchscreen. The results illustrated that the laboratory population of kea were indeed able to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces in a two-choice discrimination task. The results provide novel empirical evidence on abstract categorization capacities in parrots while at the same time providing further evidence of representational insight in kea. Visual-Discrimination; Face Recognition; Pigeons; Objects; Birds; Dogs; Evolution; Pictures; Monkeys; Signals http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/api/object/o:2413/download 10.1098/rsos.230228 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:605 application/pdf Royal Society Open Science 10(6) (2023) Royal Society Open Science 10 6 580.41 kB 2023