animal cognition – Page 4 – Pain In The Bud

Foundation Offers $10m For ‘Cracking The Code’ Of Animal Language

Think you can decipher the rhythmic clicks and whistles of dolphins or the grunts and alarm calls of monkeys? A foundation is offering big prizes for progress in communicating with animals.

Looking to prompt renewed efforts at decoding animal communication, a non-profit founded by an investor and a university are offering prizes — including a hefty $10 million — to teams that can figure out what animals are “saying.”

The Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. (Yes, it’s named after that Dr. Dolittle.)

Entrants aren’t asked to come up with a Star Trek-like “universal translator” for animals. Rather, the people behind the Coller Dolittle Challenge want to see methods that allow for two-way communication between humans and individual species.

“We are open to any organism and any modality from acoustic communication in whales to chemical communication in worms,” said Yossi Yovel, a professor at Tel Aviv University and co-chairman of the challenge.

The grand prize is a $10 million grant or $500,000 in cash, chosen by the winner, while the Foundation will offer $100,000 prizes each year for the best entries that make significant progress toward communicating with animals. The yearly prizes will be assessed “for significant contributions to decipher, interface or mimic non-human organism communication.”

While it may seem far-fetched — and there are those who believe humans will never be able to fully understand animal communication in proper context — there have been efforts to communicate with and decode the communications of bats, dolphins, whales and some primate species. Scientists have also pushed the boundaries on understanding group communication, such as the coordination involved in avian murmurations.

orangutan on tree — Orangutans have demonstrated the ability to understand abstract concepts, like using money, rudimentary sign language, and have even deceived humans. One orangutan in the 1960s repeatedly escaped his zoo enclosure by hiding a small strip of metal in his mouth and using it to pick a lock. Credit: Klub Boks/Pexels

The organizers believe artificial intelligence will be the tool that ultimately helps crack the communication barrier, but entrants aren’t required to use AI. The technology is incredibly useful for tasks involving pattern recognition and sorting large amounts of data, both of which are important in this kind of work when researchers are tasked with analyzing thousands of audio samples or hundreds of hours of footage.

Alas, we don’t think the foundation will be interested in the Buddinese language, which boasts 327 different ways of demanding food and features a timekeeping and calendar system based on meals and naps. A short trill followed by a series of staccato meows, for example, means “I expect prompt service at salmon o’clock,” while a truncated meow ending with a scoff is used to indicate displeasure when a human napping substrate tosses too much during sleep.

Still, maybe we’ll dress it up to make it look properly academic and give the challenge a try. Those prizes could buy a lot of Roombas!

The Dividing Line Between Human And Animal Has Been Blurred Again As AI Reveals Startlingly Complex Whale Language

By unlocking the mysteries of how sperm whales communicate and demonstrating their impressive cognitive abilities, researchers hope to get people invested in the fate of these endangered animals.

Sperm whales are chatty.

Their language is markedly different from the deep cetacean moans associated with other whales, taking the form of Morse code-like clicks that boom through the ocean in a decibel range almost twice that of jet engines.

And while we’ve long known animals like monkeys assign specific meaning to short vocalizations varying from alarm calls to affirmations of social rank, sperm whale conversations can endure for an hour or more, with participants exchanging complex strings of clicks that vary depending on context, environment and even which pod family is speaking.

Sperm_whale_Tim_Cole_NMFS_crop — An aerial view of a sperm whale near the ocean surface. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While artificial intelligence has been maligned over the past few years as people grapple with its rapid progress and potential for abuse, it remains the best tool we have for teasing out patterns that our human minds can’t discern, especially from large quantities of data.

With more than 9,000 recordings of sperm whales, Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit effort to decode and translate sperm whale communication — had precisely the kind of huge data cache that AI excels at analyzing.

By feeding the recordings into specially trained machine learning algorithms, the research team was able to identify a wealth of new language patterns. While human languages are composed of quantized morphemes — prefixes, suffixes and root words — whale communication is broken down into sequences of clicks and pauses called “codas.”

Like Morse code, codas make a distinction between short clicks and long clicks. Sperm whales also vary the tempo of the clicks, which could represent inflection, “dialects” or concepts completely alien to the human mind.

“Some of what they’re doing might be totally different from our way of communicating and we’re probably never going to be able to fully grasp those differences,” Oregon State postdoctoral marine researcher Taylor Hersh told NPR.

A sperm whale fluke visible above the surface of the ocean. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Researchers believe the “inter-click intervals” — akin to ghost notes in music — may be as significant as the clicks themselves. Importantly, while human ears were able to identify and catalog some of the codas, the machine learning algorithms found many that human analysis missed.

That’s not surprising considering sperm whales — the loudest animals on Earth, capable of generating sounds up to 230 dB — took a much different evolutionary course and, as ocean-dwelling creatures weighing up to 90,000 pounds (40,800 kg) likely have a radically different sensorium compared to humans.

The comparisons to music go further than ghost notes.

“This study shows that coda types are not arbitrary, but rather that they form a newly discovered combinatorial coding system in which the musical concepts of rubato and ornamentation combine with two categorical, context-independent features known as rhythm and tempo, by analogy to musical terminology,” CETI’s team wrote on May 7 while unveiling the most recent study.

Sperm_whale_distribution_(Pacific_equirectangular) — Sperm whale distribution based on human sightings. Sperm whales freely travel the oceans except in cold, ice-packed environs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While people have used many abilities to mark the dividing line between humans and animals over the years — including the ability to use tools, experience emotions, and demonstrate self-awareness — human capacity for authentic language with syntax and context-dependent meaning was one of the stalwarts, standing the test of time as new research toppled the other dividers by showing animals do indeed use tools, experience rich emotions and have complex inner mental lives.

With this research, scientists are assembling a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that will make it easier to discern and catalog whale codas.

To be clear, there’s still a lot of work ahead before scientists can prove sperm whale codas are comparable to human definitions of language, but whether they strictly meet that definition may not matter. After all, it’s clear the clicks and pauses of whale codas are imbued with meaning, even if it remains elusive to us for the moment.

Indeed, “sperm whale communication has both contextual and combinatorial structure not previously observed in whale communication,” the team wrote.

Proving sperm whale codas are tantamount to human language isn’t the goal anyway. The team has two overriding priorities — decode the meanings behind the codas, and get the wider public invested in the fate of these endangered animals by showing they’re not so different from us.

“Our results show there is much more complexity than previously believed,” MIT AI lab director Daniela Rus told NPR, “and this is challenging the current state of the art or state of beliefs about the animal world.”

New York Times Ethicist: ‘My Boyfriend Said He’d Save Our Cat but Not a Stranger if Both Were Drowning’

As Charles Darwin pointed out, the difference between humans and animals is one of degree, not kind. That should factor into discussions on the value of animal life.

The headline — ‘My Boyfriend Said He’d Save Our Cat but Not a Stranger if Both Were Drowning’ — comes from the New York Times via its Ethicist column, in which NYU philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah answers questions from readers about moral rights and wrongs.

Here’s the full text of the question:

My boyfriend and I were talking about protecting human life, and he said that he doesn’t believe that human life is necessarily worth more than any other kind of life. For example, he said that if one of our cats were drowning next to a human who was a stranger to us (who was also drowning) and he could save just one, he would choose our cat. Is this morally wrong?

Appiah, in his very first sentence in response, regretfully calls pets “fictive kin” before pointing to a study by an experimental psychologist in which participants were asked whether they’d save their pets or a foreign tourist if both stepped in front of a bus at the same time. Forty percent of respondents picked the pet.

To his credit, Appiah notes the people who chose their pets don’t have “some grave defect of character,” and said the impulse to save a companion pet is “very human,” given all we share with our animals, including “affection, companionship, loyalty, all twined around a whole lot of memories.”

That said, Appiah says human life is more valuable:

“But yes, it’s very wrong. (In states with “duty to rescue” laws, it could be illegal too.) Those human strangers? They had rich emotional lives and they had plans, short-term and long-term, big and small; it’s a good guess that they were also part of other people’s plans, other people’s emotional lives.”

I’m not going to get into the question of whether human or animal life has more value. That’s a mine field, I don’t subscribe to the idea that we should work out hierarchies of life’s value as if we’re ranking favorite ice cream flavors, and it seems to me these “what if?” questions involving oncoming buses or trains don’t have much value in gauging reality.

After all, how many people do you know were forced to make life or death decisions in a millisecond, let alone decisions involving a complex moral and emotional calculus? Appiah seems to agree, while also pointing out that what people say in a questionnaire doesn’t necessarily predict what they’d do in the moment.

Life is life. It’s all valuable, and the survey doesn’t have much use outside the classroom or ethics columns.

Buddy the Handsome Cat — Buddy the Cat: Brains as well as brawn.

However, I do think it’s worth pointing out that much of what Appiah assumes is the difference between human and animal life — particularly rich emotional lives, cognition and value to others — can indeed be attributed to animals.

There’s been a seismic shift in the way most scientists view animal cognition over the past decade, and in many ways the acknowledgement of non-human sentience and potential sapience is long overdue — there are literally thousands of studies confirming animals are conscious, sentient, and possessed of the full range of primary and secondary emotions.

Every time we set new barriers for what distinguishes human from non-human, we’re forced to change the goalposts. When behaviorism was the dominant model, the distinction was internal thought processes. In dismantling behaviorism, Noam Chomsky helped launch the cognitive revolution. Then it was emotion and love, which crumbled with the ugly Harry Harlow studies into maternal deprivation in monkeys. Then it was capacity to reason, tool use, innovation — and every time, we’ve revised our definitions, solid in our conviction that we’re fundamentally different.

In fact, the only thing that’s held up is Charles Darwin’s original observation in 1871 that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

In other words, humans aren’t some higher order of being. We are animals. Upjumped animals in some sense, but animals all the same, subject to the same diseases, physical limitations and helplessness in the face of greater forces like nature.

We may live in an age when our planet is blanketed in satellites, scientists are on fusion’s doorstep and each one of us has the entire sum of our species’ knowledge at our fingertips, but it’s shocking how quickly the veneer of civilization can collapse when people are scared, the food runs out, social order breaks down and those primal motivations — the ones we think we’ve out-evolved — drive our actions again. The early days of the COVID pandemic was just a small reminder of that.

We don’t like talking about these uncomfortable truths because they lead to more uncomfortable truths about the billions of non-human minds we share the planet with, and how we treat them.

I can’t claim to be a philosopher, although I minored in the subject over the objections of my advisor. (He should have warned me off journalism!) But when it comes to animal cognition I do have a great teacher, an 11-pound ball of fur who won’t let me forget he’s got his own wants, needs and strong emotions. Doesn’t he deserve consideration too?

This Parrot Loves Earth, Wind And Fire

The last few decades have revealed birds like crows and parrots possess astonishing intelligence. “Bird brain” might not be much of an insult after all.

Meet Kiki the cockatiel, a bird who loves Earth, Wind and Fire so much that he sings the band’s classic hit, September, regularly — whether he’s just chilling by himself, singing along to the recording or driving his human crazy by whistling the catchy hook at ungodly hours.

“Kiki, it’s seven in the morning!” she tells him in one clip, raising an admonishing finger. “Silence!”

@kiki.tiel

Partying without me 😦 #cockatielsoftiktok #birds #fyp #for you

♬ original sound – ✨ Kiki the cockatiel✨

Kiki regards her for moment as if her request is absurd, then launches right back into September.

Hey, hey, hey
Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember?
Ba-dee-ya, dancin’ in September
Ba-dee-ya, never was a cloudy day

In another video Kiki’s human sets her phone to record and leaves the room, and Kiki busts out his favorite song again. He’s got great taste in music!

@kiki.tiel

Send help plz wheres the off button on parrot #fyp #foryou #bird #cockatiel #parrotsoftiktok #birdsoftiktok

♬ original sound – ✨ Kiki the cockatiel✨

I’ve always thought parrots are a fascinating example of animal cognition and further proof that we share our planet with billions of other minds who think and feel.

Humans and birds last shared a common ancestor more than 300 million years ago. That means between them there’s been more than 600 million years of divergent evolution resulting in radically different physiology, abilities and minds.

Yet parrots can speak while non-human primates (apes and monkeys) cannot!

For decades scientists thought apes and monkeys, by virtue of their relative similarity to humans, possessed an inmate affinity for language and that the physical limits of their vocal apparatus is what keeps them from speaking.

But a 2016 study by a team from Princeton University found monkeys do possess the vocal “hardware” to speak, meaning their mouths and throats are capable of making the sounds necessary for human language. It’s the lack of associated brain circuitry that prevents them from talking.

If the ability to speak and the ability to dance/appreciate music and rhythm is uniquely human among the primate order, and birds arrived at it at a different point in their evolutionary history, that means language and appreciation for music/rhythm developed separately along two divergent evolutionary lines!

That’s incredible and has intriguing implications for the cognitive abilities of animals.

A common argument is that birds with the ability to form human speech are simply mimicking sounds and don’t understand what they’re saying. That’s a natural assumption given what we think we know about non-human capacity for understanding language, but research suggests it’s wrong.

Take a look at this video of the famous late African grey parrot, Alex:

When Dr. Irene Pepperberg asks Alex how many blue blocks are present on a tray with a random assortment of blocks, balls and triangular toys in different colors, Alex can’t give a rote answer. First he has to understand that a question is a request for information and not part of the strange human ritual called small talk. He can’t simply count or guess at the number of blocks either.

Instead, Alex has to perform two calculations. He must tally the blue objects and count the number of them that are blocks, or he’s got to count the number of blocks and figure out how many of them are blue.

If he was simply repeating information in context — like saying “Hello!” when a person walks into a room — Alex wouldn’t be able to correctly answer the questions, and Pepperberg’s research funding would have dried up. Instead, Alex became a focal point of research that persisted for decades.

There’s no indication Alex could master syntax, which has proven elusive for even the smartest animals. But the African grey, who died in 2007 at 31 years old, was curious, asking questions that were unique and unexpected of an animal. He once asked his caretakers to describe his physical appearance, and the night before he died, he told Pepperberg: “You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.”

We’ve talked about parrots before on PITB, including Snowball the dancing cockatiel who not only appreciates music and has a great sense of rhythm, but also has an entire repertoire of unique dance moves. Then there’s my personal favorite, Ruby the African grey, who has demonstrated mastery of absolutely vile, uniquely British insults.

Sure, there may not be much research value in hearing Ruby hurl verbal abuse at her very loving human, Nick Chapman, but few things have made me laugh as hard as that extraordinarily foul-mouthed bird. She has to be seen and heard to be believed. (But if you’ve got kids in the room, stick with the wholesome Snowball. He’s got serious moves.)

Snowball the dancing parrot — Scientists credit Snowball with choreographing his own dance routines, with dozens of individual dance moves and combinations, and moves that change depending on the song he’s rocking out to.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to teach a certain feline a few Earth, Wind and Fire songs in the hope that he’ll give up on the screeching meows and use his natural falsetto for a more gentle wake-up experience.

Hey, hey, hey
Ba-dee-ya, hey there my Big Buddy
Ba-dee-ya, Little Buddy’s hungry!
Ba-dee-ya, get your lazy ass up and feeeeeed me!

‘Where’s Mine, Dude?’: How My Cat Makes Me Feel Guilty

“I will make you feel guilty, human. Then you will feed me.”

When I adopted Buddy I never thought I’d have such a talkative and friendly cat. Or one who seems to be an expert on human psychology, for that matter.

The little guy has made a habit of following me to the kitchen, even rousing himself from naps the instant he hears the fridge door opening, the rustling of a bag or the clunk of a closing cabinet.

Employing a different strategy than the meow-heavy, “FEED ME NOW!” style he uses at meal time, he sits in the doorway of the kitchen and watches me silently. If I fail to retrieve a snack for him, he doesn’t move.

Last night I’d forgotten to get him something and when I set my cereal bowl down on the coffee table and sank back into the couch, I looked over and saw Bud still sitting in the kitchen doorway, managing to simultaneously look sad and silently incriminating with his big green eyes.

“Where’s mine, dude? Dude, where’s mine?” he seems to say, pouring it on thick. “I thought we did everything together, yet here you are enjoying a snack while your best little Buddy is standing just a few feet away, feeling betrayed as you eat your Frosted Flakes. I guess we weren’t best buddies after all.”

Because I can’t stand that incriminating look and I know the situation will escalate if I don’t act, I dutifully rise from the couch and assume my responsibility as Bud’s faithful human servant, fetching some of his favorite dental treats.

His tail curls into a happy question mark and he trills his happiness.

“Guilty? Betrayed? Ah, all forgotten! Difficulties are dissolved into mere misunderstandings where snacks are concerned, my human friend!”

Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing the little guy. Or maybe he really is a master of human psychology who can manipulate human emotions with the twist of his paw.