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It appears humans aren't the only ones to assign names to their fellows.
What other elements of cognition - long assumed to be unique to humans - will be discovered amongst non-humans?
Via the BBC
Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found.
The mammals are able to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.St Andrews University researchers studying in Florida discovered bottlenose dolphins used names rather than sound to identify each other.
The three-year-study was funded by the Royal Society of London.
Dr Vincent Janik, of the Sea Mammal Unit at St Andrews University, said they conducted the research on wild dolphins.
He said: "We captured wild dolphins using nets when they came near the shore.
Then in the shallow water we recoded their whistles before synthesising them on a computer so that we had a computer voice of a dolphin.
"Then we played it back to the dolphins and we found they responded. This showed us that the dolphins know each other's signature whistle instead of just the voice.
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What other elements of cognition - long assumed to be unique to humans - will be discovered amongst non-humans?
Everything, to an extent.
All the rudiments for language, cultural exchange, emotion, self awareness and whatever other human ascriptions one can imagine, are all there in our animal brother and sisters.
It's interesting too to look at animals for traits we humans have no comprehension of. Perhaps all around us is the practice material we need for when/if we discover non-terrestrial forms of intelligence.
Dolphins are the closest thing to aliens we have to study around here. Can they teach us anything? (A very Douglas Adams type question...) -
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CommentAuthorDr. Orphusi
- CommentTimeMay 9th 2006
For me, the next possible revolution in reality (ala Copernicus, Freud, etc) is quite deceptively simple. Nothing mind-blowing, or 4th-dimensionally cosmic... it would simply involve discovering, or being able to prove, that dolphins have an intelligence that is as complex as our own. This is yet another step towards that. They’ve already proved self-awareness. They communicate. They have sex for fun. I can quite easily imagine dolphins being as completely intelligent as we are, with their own alien language and thought processes to which we have no access because they simply don’t have the appropriate limbs to communicate it to us.
It would be a revolution because it’d once again reduce our importance… knowing that another species, on our very own planet no less, is as aware and as intelligent as ourselves… now that’d be great.
Perhaps we could transplant a dolphin brain into a robotic body, see what happens. -
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I was just reading in New Scientist that the same system they used to analyse the dolphin sounds uncovered a distinct syntax underlying whale calls...
Sound bites always get my juices flowing!
I also just posted this question to AskMeFi:
What experiments have been carried out where animals perform better than us at particular cognitive tasks?
Results are forthcoming... -
New Scientist to the Rescue:
When chimps outsmart humans
The idea of chimps outperforming humans in mental skills is extraordinary. Can you give us some examples?
One powerful example is short-term memory. Imagine a chimp that has already been trained to count to nine looking at a computer screen on which the first nine numerals flash up briefly before they turn into identical white squares. The task is to press the squares in ascending order of the numbers they have replaced. All our adult chimps do this as well as humans, or slightly better, and the performance of their infants exceeds theirs. The same superiority of infant over adult exists in humans in this task, by the way. Think of the card game Pelmanism (also known as "pairs"), in which you have to pick the pair of a card from a mass of other cards which are upside down, after having only briefly glimpsed their picture sides. Children beat adults at this game hands down.
But why should chimps have better short-term memory than humans?
It could be a special intellectual capability that they acquired after the lineages of our ancestors and chimps split five or six million years ago. But another evolutionary scenario is also possible: humans and chimps share many cognitive features. Humans gained some after the split, notably language, but since all brains have their limits, they had to give something else up and that something was a certain amount of short-term memory capacity, which chimps retained. It may not be obvious in the wild, but we have shown that with a little education, we can extract it. That scenario would also explain why in general, human kids lose their competitive edge in Pelmanism once their language skills are fully developed.
What else are chimps better at?
Recognising faces upside down. Show a human a photograph of someone they know, a friend or Hollywood icon, say, and they recognise that person immediately. Show them the picture upside down and they are stumped. Chimps don't have that problem with chimp faces, which is probably a good thing since they like to hang upside down in trees. In the wild, we already know of more things they are better than us at. My studies at my field station in Bossou have shown that wild chimps make use of about 200 plant species out of 600 in the forest. They can discriminate - they have a botanist's memory for these plants, their seasons, locations and their uses.
You've found that the Bossou chimps can crack nuts using stone tools, too. Is that a skill that was retained, or gained at the expense of something else?
We have to be careful because now we are talking about cultural knowledge rather than cognitive capacity, which changes over evolutionary timescales and ends up differentiating species. Cultural knowledge comes and goes much more rapidly. But yes, this kind of knowledge is lost all the time. The Bossou chimps are the only wild community we know of that cracks nuts in this way. Due to various factors, mainly habitat loss, poaching and contagious diseases, many individuals of reproductive age have been lost. The community is dying and with it, that technological advance.
Does technology regress as well as advance in humans too?
Certainly, look at the Egyptian pyramids: for a long time nobody knew how they were built. That's a dramatic example - in general I prefer to say that knowledge increases overall, while individual skills may be lost, or skills are lost to individuals. Recently I visited the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, to see Ötzi the iceman, who died over 5000 years ago. When I looked closely at his belongings - his hat, underwear, shoes, bow and arrow, right down to the acupuncture marks on his body - I was amazed by their sophistication. All that was his work, or the work of a family member. Humans living in the modern industrial age have lost the range of technologies that were once known to a single individual....
...Are you finding some other big surprises?
In many ways, chimps' perception and interpretation of the world is as developed as ours. For example, chimps recognise the same boundaries on the colour spectrum as humans. I can't say anything about their subjective experience of colour, just as I can't say anything about yours, but chimps trained to call the primary colours by their English labels attach those labels to the same parts of the visible spectrum that humans do.
And I have very early evidence that chimps may also be susceptible to the Stroop effect - the conflict that is set up in your brain when you are asked to name the colour of ink that a word is printed in, when that word describes a different colour. If it's true, that would suggest that the chimp mind can process two different information streams simultaneously, and detect a conflict between them. That's a level of sophistication that hasn't been suspected to date. - link
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