neurodudes

This nytimes article describes an experiment in which

1) In front of chimps, human researchers demonstrate opening a box, but they throw in some unnecessary steps. The box is constructed so that an onlooker can figure out which steps are unnecessary just by watching. The chimps learn to open the box, but skip the unnecessary steps.
2) In front of human children, the researchers do the same thing. The children learn to open the box, but are careful to do exactly what the demonstrator did, including the unnecessary steps.

The children’s awareness of which steps were unnecessary in condition (4) is shown by having some children who do not get to see a demonstration of how to open the box. These children are able to figure out how to open it (without the unnecessary steps, of course).

Thus, human children, as compared to chimps, are more likely to imitate exactly what they see.

Victoria Horner, Andrew Whiten. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens), Animal Cognition, Volume 8, Issue 3, Jul 2005, Pages 164 – 181

This is really weird!

Somebody debunk this before it blows my mind.

–Stephen

”
“We’ve been observing gorillas for 10 years here, and we have two cases of them using detached objects as tools,” said Thomas Breuer, from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), who heads the study team in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“In the first case, we had a female crossing a pool; and this female has crossed this pool by using a detached stick and testing the water depth, and trying to use it as a walking stick,” he told the BBC.

The second case saw another female gorilla pick up the trunk of a dead shrub and use it to lean on while dredging for food in a swamp.

She then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge.
”

BBC article

“For example, the monkeys could master simple word structures, analogous to realising that “the” and “a” are always followed by another word. But they were unable to grasp phrase patterns analogous to “if… then…” constructions.”

(actually, in the study, the grammar that the monkeys could do was “A is always followed by B”, and what they couldn’t do was “Repeat A for some number of times, and then repeat B the same number of times”)

New Scientist article

Article in Science

Commentary in Science, with a list of some types of intelligence differences between humans and monkeys.

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?language=english&type=article&article_id=218392150

“…they’re learning things from each other and they’re passing it on to other whales…”

“…different pods of whales can have distinctly different sets of behaviors and languages even though they share territory.”

Timothy Gentner at UCSD claims in a talk abstract that songbirds can learn CFGs.
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Fascinating NYTimes article on how birds may be as intelligent as primates, and how the assumption that a layered cortex is the hallmark of higher intelligence may be wrong. Mentions the work of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium (see avianbrain.org) to modernize avian anatomical nomenclature.
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Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer show that a border collie named Rico is able to learn words in a single trial, is able to recall the words months later, and has a vocabulary of about 200 words, similar to a three year old human.
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