How Language and Culture Matter in Learning - [Video]

(GeeksAreSexy, 13, Jan 2013) - Phdcomics have released a new video, this one from the Language and Linguistics department at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Sara Ciesielski is producing a thesis called “Language Development and Socialization in Sherpa” and here it is…in 2 minutes:

[Via PhDcomics)

New study says birds learn how to build nests

BBC News (Sept. 26, 2011) New study has found birds learn the art of nest-building, rather than it being just an instinctive skill.

Researchers from Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews Universities studied film of southern masked weavers recorded by scientists in Botswana.

This colourful species was chosen because individual birds build many complex nests in a season.

Dr Patrick Walsh of Edinburgh University said the study revealed "a clear role for experience".

The research has been published in the Behavioural Processes journal.

Individual birds varied their technique from one nest to the next and there were instances of birds building nests from left to right as well as from right to left.

Even for birds, practise makes perfect”Dr Patrick WalshUniversity of Edinburgh

As birds gained more experience, they dropped blades of grass less often.

"If birds built their nests according to a genetic template, you would expect all birds to build their nests the same way each time. However this was not the case," added Dr Walsh.

"Southern Masked Weaver birds displayed strong variations in their approach, revealing a clear role for experience.

"Even for birds, practise makes perfect."

How Far Will Dolphins Go to Relate to Humans?

New York Times Science (Sept. 19, 2011) - OFF THE BAHAMAS — In a remote patch of turquoise sea, Denise L. Herzing splashes into the water with a pod of 15 Atlantic spotted dolphins. For the next 45 minutes, she engages the curious creatures in a game of keep-away, using a piece of Sargassum seaweed like a dog’s chew toy.

Dr. Herzing is no tourist cavorting with marine mammals. As the world’s leading authority on the species, she has been studying the dolphins for 25 years as part of the Wild Dolphin Project, the longest-running underwater study of its kind.

“I’m kind of an old-school naturalist,” she said. “I really believe in immersing yourself in the environment of the animal.”

Immerse herself she has. Based in Jupiter, Fla., she has tracked three generations of dolphins in this area. She knows every animal by name, along with individual personalities and life histories. She has captured much of their lives on video, which she is using to build a growing database.

And next year Dr. Herzing plans to begin a new phase of her research, something she says has been a lifetime goal: real-time two-way communication, in which dolphins take the initiative to interact with humans.

Up to now, dolphins have shown themselves to be adept at responding to human prompts, with food as a reward for performing a task. “It’s rare that we ask dolphins to seek something from us,” Dr. Herzing said.

But if she is right, the dolphins will seek to communicate with humans, and the reward will be social interaction itself, with dolphins and humans perhaps developing a crude vocabulary for objects and actions.

Other scientists are excited by the project. “ ‘Mind-blowing’ doesn’t do justice to the possibilities out there,” said Adam Pack, a cetacean researcher at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and an occasional collaborator with Dr. Herzing. “You’ve got crystal-clear warm water, no land in sight and an interest by this community of dolphins of engaging with humans.”

How far will dolphins go to engage?

“The key is going to be coming up with a system in which the dolphins want to communicate,” said Stan Kuczaj, director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern Mississippi. “If they don’t care, it won’t work.”

Dr. Kuczaj developed an early two-way communication system while working at a captive lab in Orlando in the late 1980s. The system relied on visual symbols, not sound, and used a large stationary keyboard that proved to be too cumbersome.

But he says that the effort gave him confidence that such a system could work and that Dr. Herzing is “definitely the closest to getting there.”

“If it works,” he said, “it’ll be a huge step forward.”

Continue reading: "How Far Will Dolphins Go to Relate to Humans?" >>

Exposing the Impact of Our Choices on Nonhuman Animals

Care2 by Zoe Weil (Sept. 19, 2011)

In 1985, I was fascinated by what I’d read about Sarah, a chimpanzee who could use a symbolic language to communicate, so I contacted Dr. David Premack, the principal researcher working with Sarah and other chimps at the University of Pennsylvania primate research lab, to volunteer. I’ll never forget meeting Sarah. When I was brought to her cage, I was warned to stay away from the bars because Sarah was strong enough, and often aggressive enough, to grab me and cause severe injury.

Sarah lived alone in her cage. The four other chimps at the lab were only three years old, and I was told that Sarah might harm them, so this social animal was confined permanently in solitude. She had long since refused to continue with her language training, so her life consisted largely of watching soap operas on a TV on the other side of her cage or sitting in her small outdoor enclosure. It was the new young chimps, who were the subjects in the ongoing language acquisition studies who lived together and had a huge outdoor space in which to play.

Sarah threw what was described as a temper tantrum when introduced to new people, and I was no exception. She screamed and bounded from wall to wall, but I felt determined to have a positive relationship with her. Every time I volunteered I made a point of visiting Sarah. One day I said to her, “Sarah, turn around and I’ll scratch your back.” I rotated my right index finger in the air as I said “turn around” in case she didn’t understand my words. Sure enough, Sarah turned around, sank down to sit on the floor and pressed her back against the bars of the cage. I was unafraid as I went up to her and scratched her back.

I didn’t volunteer for very long. One of the young chimps bit my hand when I was paying too much attention to another who had climbed onto my shoulders. Even a three-year-old chimp can administer quite a bite, and it came just a week before my father died, and I needed to be gone for some time. I realized I didn’t really want to go back. Once I’d seen behind the scenes of something that had initially seemed so benign – teaching chimpanzees language – I realized just how much suffering was being inflicted on these cousins of ours.

For years I felt haunted by Sarah. Was she to live out her days in isolation and misery? All I could do was tell her story and, as a humane educator, teach, so that we might make different societal choices in relationship to others, whether people or nonhuman animals. Fifteen years later, I learned that Sarah had found a final home at Chimp Haven, a chimpanzee sanctuary that houses chimps formerly used in medical research, entertainment and as pets. My eyes filled with tears of relief at this good news.

Continue reading: "Exposing the Impact of Our Choices on Nonhuman Animals" >>

Escaped Pet Birds Are Teaching Wild Birds to Speak English

Treehugger (Sept. 15, 2011) Across parts of Australia, reports have been pouring in of strange voices chattering high in the treetops -- mysterious, non-sensical conversations in English. But while this phenomenon is certainly quite odd, its explanation isn't paranormal. It turns out that escaped pet birds, namely parrots and cockatoos, have begun teaching their wild bird counterparts a bit of the language they picked up from their time in captivity -- and, according to witnesses, that includes more than a few expletives.

Jaynia Sladek, an ornithologist from the Australian Museum, says that some birds are just natural mimickers, able to acquire new sounds based on things they hear around them. For birds kept as pets, these sounds tend to mirror human language -- but that influence doesn't cease even after said birds escape or are released back into the wild.

Once back in their natural environments, these chatty ex-pets eventually join with wild birds who, in turn, start picking up the new words and sounds. The remnants of that language also eventually gets passed along to the escaped birds' offspring, much like it does for humans.

"There's no reason why, if one comes into the flock with words, [then] another member of the flock wouldn't pick it up as well," Sladek said in an interview with Australian Geographic.

According to the report, 'Hello cockie' is one of the most commonly heard phrases feral birds are teaching in the wild, along with a host of expletives -- perhaps the last words those escapees heard after their frantic owners realized they were making a break for freedom.

The Private Life of... PIGS

AIRED: Thursday, 22 July, 20:00 on BBC Two

The Private Life of... turns its attention this week towards the mental lives of pigs.  Presented by Jimmy Doherty the series sets out to reveal the hidden lives of farmyard animals using a variety of simple psychometric testing measures.  Set on a farm in Dartmoor, Jimmy embarks on a quest to uncover the answers to questions such as, how sensitive is a pigs nose? Why can they find truffles underground? How do piglets find the right teat to feed from? (and by far the most interesting question of the episode), Can pigs recognise themselves in a mirror?

Traditionally the mirror test is a measure of self-awareness developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. (1970).  Inspired by the written accounts of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and his reports on holding a mirror up to an orangutan and recording the corresponding facial and bodily actions.  Darwin suggested that these expressions were ambiguous and either signified that the primate was making expressions at what it perceived to the another animal, or it could be playing a sort of game with a new toy -  the animal might not be recognising itself but instead be attributing that image to another or, alternatively it might be recognising that the object that it holds represents an image of itself and so demonstrate an understanding of self-awareness.

It was through these observations that Gallup devised a test that attempted to gauge self-awareness by trying to discover whether an animal could recognise its own reflection in a mirror mark test.  Also referred to as the rouge test, the experiment is conducted covertly placing a mark of the participants body.  Ideally the spot should be placed in an area that is clearly visible to the animal in the mirror and can be physically reached with an appendage (reaching in this manner might suggest the identification of the foreign agent).  The control measure would therefore be a mark to an accessible part of the body but still remains out-of-sight.  Researchers then observe behaviours that might show the recognition of the placed mark.

To date animals that have passed the mirror test include all of the great apes, bottle-nosed dolphins, orcas, elephants and European magpies, with human children failing this test until they reach 18 months old.  Not surprisingly, pigs have previously been found to pass a variation of the mirror mark test, using the mirrors image to obtain information about a food source (Broom, Sena and Moynihan, 2009).  Under the watchful eye of Broom, it was precisely this measure of mirror self recognition that the programme used during the procedure.

Whilst the total amount of piglets used during testing was relatively low (expectantly due to the time constraints of the programme), the piglets did show a marked preference towards the location of the food when the mirror was present, suggesting that each piglet used the information from the mirror and its surroundings, deduced the relationship between the two and acted accordingly in finding the food source.  This therefore might suggest a form of assessment awareness in pigs.  Whilst the results were by no means conclusive, with a friend commenting on the suitability of the mirror mark test on an animal that has no flexible appendages and whether or not the piglet recognised itself in relation to the food (or just simple recognised the food), it does highlight the need for further research into the areas of animal cognition and self recognition.  I therefore suggest that what is needed are better designed measures of self-awareness and the acknowledgement of these mental lives in order to help in the welfare of all animal species.

Link: The Private Life of...Pigs