Snowball — everybody's favourite dancing cockatoo — is back alright!

Key points: Researchers found Snowball had 14 distinct dance moves

Researchers found Snowball had 14 distinct dance moves They think the impulse to dance to music arises when five traits converge

They think the impulse to dance to music arises when five traits converge They can't be certain whether Snowball creates his own moves or is a very good mimic

The sulphur-crested cockatoo has shown he's not just a one-hit wonder, with new footage released today showcasing the bird's diverse array of dance moves to two classic 80s songs.

Snowball first found fame a decade ago, when US researchers showed he could bob his head in time to the beat of The Backstreet Boys' song Everybody (Backstreet's Back).

In their latest study, published today in the journal Current Biology, the researchers focussed on the spontaneity and diversity of the movements Snowball makes to music.

While spontaneously moving to music is common across humans, it's relatively rare in other species and absent in other non-human primates.

The researchers filmed Snowball dancing to Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want To Have Fun and Queen's Another One Bites The Dust. He was played each track three times.

They then conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of the resulting footage and found that Snowball made 14 distinct moves and two composite moves to the music, ranging from body rolls to headbanging to vogueing.

Interestingly, Snowball danced differently each time he heard a particular track, which the researchers said was a sign of his flexibility in moving to music.

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"We were surprised by the sheer diversity of Snowball's movements to music, all of which emerged without any training, through social interaction with humans," said psychologist and study co-author Aniruddh Patel of Tufts University.

It suggests we need to rethink the assumption that sophisticated movement to music is something unique to humans, Professor Patel said.

What gets us dancing?

"We think the impulse to dance to music arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in animal brains," Professor Patel said.

In the paper, the researchers identified five capacities that they see coming together uniquely in both parrots and humans.

The first is complex vocal learning, or the ability to learn to make complex novel sounds based on experience of what we've heard. This capacity creates strong links in the brain between hearing and movement.

"Humans are the only primates with this ability, which could explain why no other primate shows spontaneous and diverse movement to music," Professor Patel said.

Humans seek out other people when they want to dance. ( Unsplash CC: Levi Guzman )

The second is the capacity for nonverbal movement imitation, or being able to watch someone perform a movement and then replicate it yourself.

Then there's the tendency to form long-term social bonds, which relates to the fact that Snowball (and humans) seem to dance for social reasons, rather than for food or as part of mating rituals.

"It's striking that in our modern world people often listen to music on their own, for example on their phones, but still seek out other people when they want to dance," Professor Patel said.

The ability to learn complex sequences of actions is another skill seemingly shared by both parrots and humans. This requires sophisticated neural processing, Professor Patel said, since we're talking about movements that aren't innate.

And finally, the attentiveness to communicative movements, which means we look at the structure of the movements not just the consequences of actions.

How does Snowball get his killer dance moves?

So is Snowball a very creative dancer or just a great imitator of humans? The researchers say they can't be certain.

"We don't know for sure which of Snowball's movements are imitations of human dance movements and which are the products of his own creation," Professor Patel said.

"We think some of his move are likely to be his own creation, because his owner doesn't make these moves when she dances with him."

Indeed, no one was dancing with him when the videos were filmed.

And even if Snowball is more a great imitator than a great creator, that still points to him having remarkably sophisticated abilities, Professor Patel said, given that humans and parrots have such different body types.

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Gisela Kaplan, a professor of animal behaviour at the University of New England who was not involved in the study, said the team had done a good piece of research by analysing Snowball's dance moves in such a precise way, and summarising the traits that could be causing them.

"It seems — and that's what makes the paper interesting — that cockatoos have reached the same point [as humans] ... where the convergence of different traits that may have developed separately suddenly come together to be able to form something new," Professor Kaplan said.

"The convergence of these abilities have obviously led to something that we need to be able to explain and haven't been able to explain before."

Professor Kaplan said the "seminal" paper opened up the door for new research possibilities.

She added that, cognitively, moving from imitation to creativity wasn't that difficult.

"There is a big step still from imitation to being creative and producing something new yourself in a new context," she said.

"But once you've established the first step, then the second step is not far away."