Animal communication Flashcards
What are the 3 reasons as to why we are interested in animal communication? We can communicate what we have ___
To understand 1) the cognitive mechanisms necessary, 2) the brain mechanisms necessary and 3) the type of info which can be communicated. Learnt
Does communication refer only to verbal language?
No it refer to body language too and pheromones
Von Frisch (1973): The round and waggle dance by honey bees indicates the…. Are bees uncontrollably influenced to follow the directions of the dance?
Direction and distance of the location of food away from the hive. No, they can stick to private info if they wish
What happens when a queue bee dies?
She must be replaced. After emerging from the royal jelly treatment, the first candidate attempts to kill competitors. The candidate toots and the victim quacks
Name 4 parallels between human speech and bird song. They have recently been replicated with ___ birds in the southern hemisphere
Both 1) require learning, unlike other species which do not require exposure for acquisition, 2) show hemispheric asymmetry for language processing, 3) require the capacity to perceive and produce speech and 4) show sensitive periods for learning. Female
In the ___ of the sparrow, SURs have found cells which respond to…. Bird song neurons have also been found in the ___. Whilst originally found in low-level areas, bird song neurons have more recently been identified in…
Pallium. Particular aspects of bird song. Striatum. Higher-level areas
So if birdsong is learnt, does a finch have the innate capacity to learn any type of finch? Where in the brain does manipulating bird song experience have an effect?
Not completely, zebra finch exposed only to bengalese finch learn bengalese finch but it contains tints of zebra finch, suggesting that bird song is a little hard wired. On the tuning of midbrain and forebrain neurons
To learn the causal structure of the environment, animals must learn 2 types of temporal info:
1) the covariation of events, 2) the temporal relations between events
Gopnik believed that Pavlov’s dogs could ‘not ring the bell for the food’ because…
They lacked temporal causal maps, like the notion of cognitive maps in the spatial domain
Pigeons can be trained to discriminate between artificially grammatical vs. ungrammatical combinations of sounds. Grammar was defined by…
The temporal/ serial order of sounds
Hungry rats can be trained to fetch food after hearing 4…and not after hearing each CS pair in the ___ order. Neurons in the monkey ___ ___ ___ encode temporal order
Pairs of sounds. Reverse. Left lateral PFC
Give an example of higher-order inhibitory conditioning
A light cues food but not when preceded by a tone
Rats exhibit temporal rule learning in conditioning in as much as when trained that ABA predicts food they will respond more to
CDC than CCD or DCC
The study of clever hans should teach us…
To avoid simple explanations of complex behaviour. Clever Hans appeared to be able to read and write by tapping his foot in response to his owner’s pointing, yet it was later discovered that the horse managed this by detecting implicit cues from the owner as to the right answer
