Showing posts with label Baboons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baboons. Show all posts

Reading Four Letter Words


We are adept at recognizing patterns and other primates are too. Survival for monkey or man  is dependent on such observations. One of the most difficult patterns that we work with everyday is writing, perhaps we could say that this is our crowning achievement.

When we’re young we’re taught to read by whatever method is fashionable at the time.  But we should remember that our methodology isn’t unique.  Hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are two systems that require recognizing patterns for complete words as opposing building them up from a variety of building blocks.

So what about our primate cousins? The BBC report on some research by Grainger and Fagot with baboons (1).  The baboons had to recognize words on a touch screen so that they could touch a cross or an oval to indicate if the letters were a word or not in order to get a goodie.

The researchers were tireless in that they showed their participants 61k different combinations of letters. Our baboon friends became quite adept at recognizing four letter words. The top performer, Dan, was good for at least 300. No mention was made of any understanding beyond that the pattern meant ‘goodie.’

To me, this doesn’t seem to surprising as being shut in a compound with nothing much else to do. Punching a computer screen for treats would seem to be a pastime that might be worth trying. After all, in the wild, rapid pattern recognition is a survival skill.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17676129


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A Numbers Game


What is the numerical competence of monkeys? This is a matter that we must all wonder about from time to time. As I miscount the change that I’m proffering when purchasing a non-fat latte with one raw sugar, and not forgetting the cinnamon sprinkle, I sometimes wish that I had a numerically competent one handy, when feeling embarrassed as I get the extra coins back. One would prove even more useful when there are several of us trying to work out shares of a lunch bill.

Some primates, such as Lowland Gorillas have been shown to perform well at low levels, as would be appropriate to the species. Along with cats, dogs, chicks and mosquitofish as it turns out. However, Schmitt and Fischer of U of Göttingen have given a bunch of baboons and macaques their final term papers and have published the results yesterday (1).

If offered a choice of plates with different numbers of peanuts, or in other experiments, raisins, there was a little ambivalence, and their eagerness to eat overcame their abstract reasoning abilities. The baboons soon tired of peanuts and had to be tempted just with raisins. The real tests came when black pebbles were substituted for raisins. One raisin per pebble was given on their choice.

The results? The two types of monkeys did very well in working out if there were more pebbles in one dish that the other. They did care if there was only one pebble difference but cared a lot more if there was two or more different. With scores of 84%, they received a B+ grade. They did not like to be short changed any more than the rest of us.
  

1 . Schmitt V., & Fischer J., Nat. Commun. 2:257 doi: 10.1038/ncomms1262 (2011).

Don't I Know You from Somewhere?


Learning about group dynamics is always interesting, especially for the small groups like those that we interact with daily. A key prerequisite is that we have to know who is in our ‘gang’ and who isn’t, so learning to “never forget a face” is an early occupation.  Schell et al in Animal Cognition (1) looked at the ability of Barbary macaques to pick out bad guys from mug shots. My first unworthy thought from my snobbish primate stance was that one macaque looks very much like another. Not correct of course. A well brought up macaque can tell the good, the bad and the ugly at a glance.

The youngsters in the troops being interrogated were not very discriminating though, but they did like looking at the pictures. Their prejudices increase with age and their moms and dads got much more interested in looking at pictures of strangers than their snaps of their friends. Know your enemy has clearly been well understood by the time they reach their majority.

The authors report on a rather touching piece of work carried out by Hoesch fifty years ago with baboons, or one in particular, who had been trained to look after a herd of goats. This chappie could recognize the individual goats. However, he was paricularly adept as a goatherd because he could recognize the bleat of a separated kid and return it to its mother. That would be way above my paygrade, and suggests that maybe our industry barons should rethink their push towards robotics as there are a lot of potential workers out there who would be happy to work for peanuts.



1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/40485378447740j7/fulltext.pdf