Category: Cognitive Science

New research shows that orangutans formulate and share future plans with others in their troop.

On By A.P.In Cognitive Science, Nature, orangutan, orangutans, Science, social behavior, University of Zurich1 Comment

Very few animals have revealed an ability to consciously think about the future—behaviors such as storing food for the winter are often viewed as a function of instinct. Now a team of anthropologists at the University of Zurich has evidence that wild orangutans have the capacity to perceive the future, prepare for it and communicate those future plans to other orangutans.

The researchers observed 15 dominant male orangutans in Sumatra for several years. These males roam through immense swaths of dense jungle, emitting loud yells every couple of hours so that the females they mate with and protect can locate and follow them. The shouts also warn away any lesser males that might be in the vicinity. These vocalizations had been observed by primatologists before, but the new data reveal that the apes’ last daily call, an especially long howl, is aimed in the direction they will travel in the morning—and the other apes take note. The females stop moving when they hear this special 80-second call, bed down for the night, and in the morning begin traveling in the direction indicated the evening before.

The scientists believe that the dominant apes are planning their route in advance and communicating it to other orangutans in the area. They acknowledge, however, that the dominant males might not intend their long calls to have such an effect on their followers. Karin Isler, a Zurich anthropologist who co-authored the study in PLOS ONE last fall, explains, “We don’t know whether the apes are conscious. This planning does not have to be conscious. But it is also more and more difficult to argue that they [do not have] some sort of mind of their own.”
BRAINY BEASTS
1 Capuchin monkeys appear to have a sense of fairness, insisting on receiving as good a food reward as their peers for performing the same job.

2 Scrub jays can relocate food that has been hidden for months and may even remember how long it has been stored. The jays also anticipate potential thefts and will relocate their food if they think another jay has spotted it.

3 Rhesus macaques will not pull a chain that brings them food if they think it will harm a fellow monkey.

4 Male voles may be able to predict when a female will be most fertile and, at the opportune time, revisit the location where she was last seen.

5 Bonobos and orangutans can use tools to retrieve food and then save their tools for later use.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/orangutans-share-their-future-plans-with-others/

A language without numbers

On By A.P.In analog estimation strategy, baágiso, Brazil, Caleb Everett, Cognitive Science, Communication, hói, John Colapinto, Kebmodee, language, Maici River, numeracy, Pirahã3 Comments

no numbers

The Pirahã are an indigenous people, numbering around 700, living along the banks of the Maici River in the jungle of northwest Brazil. Their language, also called Pirahã, is so unusual in so many ways that it was profiled in 2007 in a 12,000-word piece in the New Yorker by John Colapinto, who wrote:

Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.

Among Pirahã’s many peculiarities is an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a “small size or amount,” hoí, a “somewhat larger size or amount,” and baágiso, which can mean either to “cause to come together” or “a bunch.”

With no way to express exact integers, the obvious question is: How do the Pirahã count? More pragmatically, how do they ask for two of something instead of just one? The answer—according to some of the more recent research on anumeracy, published by anthropological linguist Caleb Everett in the journal Cognitive Science—suggests, almost inconceivably, that they don’t.

Everett, the son of Christian missionaries turned linguists, lived on and off with the Pirahã during his early childhood. His parents, he told me, speak Pirahã as fluently as any Westerners ever have, though for a non-native speaker to master the language is a near impossibility. A couple of years ago, Everett traveled back to the Pirahã villages to run a few very simple experiments.

For one test, he would lay down on a table a line of evenly spaced items, say batteries, and ask the Pirahã to make a second line just like the first. For another, he would show someone a line of items and then hide it from view. Again, he would ask for a second line just like the first. In both cases, no mistakes were made as long as the lines were just two or three items long. But, as Everett wrote in his paper, “The proportion of correct responses generally drops significantly for numbers exceeding 2 or 3.” This was true for all tasks, including a non-visual test that involved clapping. English speakers, on the other hand, make no errors at all, except when a relatively long line of items, say seven or more, is shown quickly and then hidden. We can only count so fast, after all, but the Pirahã appear not to be counting at all—because, well, how could they? Instead, they’re employing what Everett calls an “analog estimation strategy,” which works well for a few items but breaks down beyond that.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps the Pirahã never needed numbers, either because precise counting is not culturally valued or because that value has a sufficient, anumeric workaround. Nothing about the Pirahã’s self-contained way of life seems to require quantity recognition over three, says Everett, a fact that’s not lost on outsiders, who sometimes take advantage of them when trading goods. Attempts over the years to teach number words and basic arithmetic to the Pirahã have met with little success, in large part because they’re uninterested. In fact, the Pirahã have a term for all languages not their own; it translates as “crooked head,” which is intended as a “clear pejorative,” as Colapinto points out:

The Pirahã consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, and they are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining monolingual.

In our increasingly data-driven culture, where we reincarnate ourselves more and more as spreadsheets, anumeracy is unthinkable. Many fear, amid the “advanced stats” revolution in all aspects of life, that what it means to be and feel human is forever changing, and not for the better. It’s perhaps comforting to know, then, that while we’re busy charting our heart rate and measuring our intake and poring over the wins above replacement values for our fantasy league, the Pirahã, immune to the relentless tyranny of numbers, will simply enjoy the game.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.