Language enables humans to construe two events as causally related. Lorikeets are able to remember sequences of events, which is tantamount to establishing temporal if-then relations — temporal conditionals — but it is not clear whether they are capable of construing one event as caused by another.
For example, their behaviour shows that they know that food appears in dishes soon after they see me arriving on the back patio, and once a daily routine is established, on seeing me, they anticipate the arrival of food by flying to the dishes before they are filled.
But when this temporal continuity is broken, they do not necessarily link me to the provision of food. For example, if I stand near their feeding dishes outside of this ritual, as many as 40 birds in the tree above will co-ordinate a very loud threatening call in an attempt to drive me away, thus treating me either as a ground predator or as a rival for their food source, rather than as the cause of its provision.
ChatGPT comments:
This beautifully illustrates the distinction between temporal association and causal reasoning. The lorikeets demonstrate a sophisticated ability to track sequences and form expectations based on them, but when the expected chain of events is disrupted, their response suggests they have not constructed a causal model that links you to the food in a way that allows for variation. Instead, they default to a more immediate interpretive frame—one that treats your presence as a potential threat rather than as an agent with intentional control over the resource.
This ties back to the idea that language allows humans to explicitly construe causation rather than just correlation. The lorikeets' behaviour suggests their cognition might not make this leap—or at least, not in this context.