Dear Students!
Next week we will have a speaker who is
one of the most important researchers in the field of animal cognition
and communication - Irene Pepperberg! She will tell us about the amazing
things a "bird brain" is able to do. Please check out the numerous
you-tube clips on Alex the parrot and his colleagues!
Our presenters will be:
Stefano: Pepperberg&Gibson&Tallerman
Yuna: BrainBehaviorReview
Jeremy: Brain&Language Alex 2010a
As usual, you will find these papers on the UMdrive.
Have fun!
Uli
Alex, like Chaser the border collie are clearly very talented animals. However, a lingering question always remains after I've read studies on these case studies. Are the talents of Alex and Chaser generalizable to the rest of their species? Or is there some kind of natural mutation that allows them to excel where others can't? Could any gray parrot be taught as well as Alex? Do all gray parrots contain this capacity for learning? Are these case studies of exemplars similar to the case studies of humans who have (nearly) photographic memories, superior autobiographical memory, who experience synesthesia, or who have the ability to perfectly label tone or pitch, etc? I understand that some of the results were replicated in the newly acquired parrots via M/R training, but I didn’t catch to what degree these parrots are able to perform when compared to Alex.
ReplyDeleteIt appears that Alex must first be able to create the utterance himself via spontaneous play before being able to map that utterance onto a novel item. Is this correct? If so, does this imply that if a speaker introduced a completely novel (both semantically and phonetically) word to Alex and paired that word with an item, that Alex would not be able to "point out" what that object is (or in other words, properly understand the label) until he is able to vocalize the novel word himself?
First and foremost, I found all the papers to be quite fascinating. Pepperberg’s research with Alex was groundbreaking in that it revealed that animals do not necessarily need a large brain in order to essentially learn complex ways of thinking through language and understanding. In the past, it was thought that birds (specifically Grey parrots) were primarily communicating through mimicry and the repetition of sounds; thus, not displaying true cognitive capabilities. And although, most captive parrots may indeed mimic, Pepperberg has shown that Greys (specifically Alex) can learn to use human speech referentially. In fact, as it was noted, they acquire these communication skills most effectively when training (or teaching) is referential and involves salient social cues. From this, my question is what is it about Greys in particular that allow them to acquire these fascinating communication skills (i.e. what sets them apart from other birds or species)? Why do Greys have greater cognitive capacities than other parrots? In addition, what makes the M/R training such a robust technique in which the Grey parrot can acquire referential speech only through this type of training? (i.e. what sets it apart from typical classical conditioning paradigms?)
ReplyDeleteKeith’s question on intra-species generalizability is also one of the questions that I have, but can this question be more or less attributed to various aspects of individual differences (e.g. sociality, learnability, etc.). A follow-up question is, are these individual differences heritable traits? Interestingly, I came across to a newly published article on PLOS ONE by Gustavo Arriaga, Eric Zhou and Erich Jarvis. They showed that mice share some of the same mechanisms used to learn vocal patterning in songbirds and humans, and claimed that “the presence of direct forebrain control over the vocal neurons may be one of the most critical aspects in the human evolution of speech.” Mice’s ultrasonic vocal imitation (so called mouse song) and grey parrot’s language learning are both impressive. If our phylogenetic distant friends can develop and evolve through training their vocal control capacity, is this going to be the same path that our speech capacity has been through? If one explains that because there is no selecting pressure for our closest primate relatives to vocalize (for the sake of survival and such), then what explains why there is even no such existing mechanism (i.e. motor neurons control for larynx) for natural selection to select for? If this is a no-function-therefore-no-mechanism question, why we are so sure that we are evolved from nonhuman primates?
ReplyDeleteIs it possible, say one day, that the training human provided and the environment human crafted can serve as a perfect artificial mechanism for mimicking the intricate working of natural selecting pressure?
Another question is about animals’ conception about temporality and locality. Whether these animals have the knowledge of not just “here and now” therefore memory for things happened in the past and in other locations.
The first question is about whether birds' critical period is the same as humans. My initial impression on bird vocalizations is that they only mindlessly imitate words we said to them, but it seems not true after reading these articles. Different from dog studies we read earlier, birds can perform both perception and production capacities, so the problem Stefano mentioned that we are not sure whether dogs really learn words referentially can be solved (if I understood his argument correctly). They have a critical period like humans as Pepperberg chaper 10, p. 116 stated, but how long the period for birds would be? I found it is hard for me to learn a second language after the critical period. Do birds also need a longer time to learn new phonemes after the critical period? Another question is that can they tell English phonemes from phonemes of other languages or they consider all the sounds taught are English? If the answers are no and yes, their behaviors may be different from human infants because infants are found to prefer native languages rather than non-native languages.
ReplyDeleteAnother question is about babbling. I am not sure if birds' babbling is the same as human infants because it takes at least six months for human infants to produce canonical babbling. Birds are production-first animals, so they learn to produce sounds with fast consonant-vowel transitions quickly. Before the onset of canonical babbling stage, human infants could not produce or imitate well-formed syllables even we provide contingent responses to them.
I found that I may be wrong about last sentence in the first paragraph. In infant speech perception studies, if infants keep hearing the same sound, they lose interest and the sucking rate decreases. When they hear new sounds, they will be attracted to the sounds. So my question will be: are there studies testing birds' perception using some methods(of course not sucking rate; perhaps brain imaging)?
DeleteMaybe some will be interested in submitting their final paper to here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.evolutionarylinguistics.org/
Call deadline: 1 February 2013
Event Dates: 17-19 May 2013
Event Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Event URL: http://evolutionarypatterns.fc.ul.pt/sub/cfa/cfa.html
Cool! Thanks for pointing this out.
DeleteI have several questions regarding these studies. First, I found it interesting that it took Alex nearly a year to be able to say the word spool. I believe this is provided as an example of learning segmentation, however, I was wondering if part of this is also attributed to a physical limitation. For example, more complex words seem to take longer to learn because they are physically harder to say. Further, if they are not learned early on, they become more difficult once past the sensitive period. I think of examples in humans where certain sounds in French become very difficult for English speakers to learn, similar examples are plentiful. Also, I wonder at which point in Alex’s life he was taught these words—could he have been beyond a sensitive period. My second question is in regard to the relationship of the lab to Alex. Specifically, were they very fond of Alex versus other Greys? Would it ever be of concern that fondness, affection, or dislike; affect the results of a study. Some of this was addressed, however, was this ever a concern. I think of developmental studies in which a parent interest, lack of interest, lack of positive feedback, or positive feedback would determine how rigorously a parent might reinforce certain lessons, or simply how much attention they would give the child.
ReplyDeleteThe findings about Alex are really impressive, they have a great scientific value and are an example of tenacious and honorable scientific commitment. I would like to reflect on the words that are used to interpret these findings, because if we don’t pay attention to the words we use, these words may mislead us and let us believe things that are not supported by the actual findings. My reflections are only an attempt to give a proper interpretation of the experiments. [Writing this post, I have realized that it is not simple to read. Unfortunately I don’t have time to correct it.]
ReplyDeleteOn page 58 of Peppemberg 2002 it is claimed that Alex “understands that ‘green’ is a particular instance of the category ‘color’”, that he “has a higher-order class concept” and other things of this kind. However, what Alex does can be described in more simple terms: when he hears the signal “What color?”, Alex looks for the color of the object, sees red and says “red” so that he can be rewarded. He does not think, “red is a color”, where this proposition put the content of thought “red” in a logical relation to another content of thought and at a distance from others. He does not think that “green is a color and not a shape”, because “green” is not an object of knowledge for Alex, but simply a specific stimulus that elicit a specific response.
I hope an example may help to clarify the point. I’m cooking airily (as usual) and I decide to cook an onion. I open the refrigerator, look around, find the last onion remained and I take it. For all this I never think the word onion, I don’t stop thinking that what I’m looking for is an onion, i.e. I don’t need to bring up the concept “onion”. Yet, clearly I have an intention toward an object of the class “onion”, I find it and I use it. The onion appears to me as an object of a certain type (exactly the type of the object I need), but I don’t pay attention to the fact that that object is an object of a certain type, I just use it according to the type of object it is. In our ordinary life, we use things according to the type of things they are without explicitly thinking what kind of things they are. In the same way, we may respond to a red thing differentially because it is a red thing without thinking that “the thing is red” or “red is a color”. This is what Alex does: when he is given a certain type of task, he responds to a red thing differently than to green thing. In the task, Alex has a general intention: an intention that is specified with respect to a certain type of property. Just as when I look for an onion (intention that is specified with respect to a certain class of objects), I don’t need to think “what I am looking for is an onion”, so Alex is not thinking “what I am looking for is a color”, when he focuses on the color of the object in order to give the appropriate response. In other words, to have an intention toward a certain type of object is not to think the concept relative to that type of object. I don’t want to play down Alex’s abilities, he can certainly distinguish between different types of things or properties. I simply want to say that Alex has no acts of thinking in the strict sense of the word and that concepts are things that are given only in acts of thinking.
ReplyDeleteThrough learning Alex has associated the term “color” to a type of property (quality) that things present: he has heard that the word color has been used for various different colors. Colors appear to Alex as a typical property of things, but this typical property (having a color) is not thematized, i.e. it is not made an object of his attention in itself. Alex has not the concept “color” (an object of thought), he has a general practical intention that he sees also in the trainers. He sees that the trainers focus on the color of objects when they hear the word “color”, so when he hears that word he focuses on the color (and not the shape) of the particular object that is in front of him.
ReplyDeleteWe would have to say similar things about the other concepts that Alex is said to have. For example, is recognizing sameness the same as having the concept of same? Can Alex talk about sameness? Does Alex show that he explicitly thinks the concept of sameness as do people when they say, “to be the same is to repeat the properties of another object”?
Alex has learned to associate a specific response (the word “none”) to a specific experience, i.e. the experience of disappointed expectation. We cannot say that he has the concept of nonexistence because he never talks about nonexistence (or “noneness”) itself, he never asks what that is, he never makes it subject of propositions.
I was surprised to learnt that parrots' have a babbling period similar to children. For some reason, I was under the impression that they simply just mimicked what they had been taught and that their communicative ability was limited to only expressions they had been taught verbatim. However, according to the Pepperberg 2009 paper, parrots actually appear to use the input they've been given to communicate, not just mimic.
ReplyDeleteThe other paper about Grey parrots goes even further to discuss how similar the context-dependent input learning environment of the parrot is to that of children. And, also, discusses how Grey parrots can not only distinguish sounds from one another, they can also distinguish similar sounds from one another. One question I had was whether or not the "new" language taught to the parrots was something they actually used to communicate with one another. It seems like one of the papers suggested this, but I may have overlooked exactly where this "inter-species" communications is actually played out.
I don't know why, but I would not have thought of studying parrots. It seems incredibly obvious to do so, given that they are even able to mimic human phonemes the way do they do. But, also, what these studies suggest is that they are able to make complex cognitive connections to the input they receive, as well.