Communication Flashcards
Why do animals communicate?
Long term
to survive and reproduce
Why do animals communicate?
Short term
alarms, food, mate attraction
Communication in the wild
Honeybee dance
Karl von Frisch (started work in 1919)
Won Nobel Prize (with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen) in 1973
Round dance
- Food sources < 100 m
- Turns in a circles to the left and then the right, continues to alternate for ~half a minute.
- Other bees gather round then fly off
Honeybee dance
•Food sources > 100 m
➢Waggles from side to side while running in a straight line
➢Turns to left, returns to start of straight line.
➢Waggle run –> turns to the right
➢Figure of eight
•Distance indicated by speed of dance (rate of waggling)
•Bearing indicated by the angle of the waggle running
Late 1960s Wenner and Wells
Bees just use odour
Now: bees do use info from the dance
Michelsen et al. (1992) – mechanical bee. Bees use distance and direction info
Riley et al. (2005) – used transponders to measure flight paths
Alarm calls Vervet monkeys (Cheney & Seyfarth)
Struhsaker (1967)
Observations in Amboseli National Park (Kenya)
Found 21 distinct messages (3 major predators: leopards, eagles, snakes)
Cheney & Seyfarth played alarm calls when no predator around = monkeys still responded
Honey bee dance
Riley et al 2005’
Study
Alarm calls Vervet monkeys (Cheney & Seyfarth)
Boy who cried wolf
➢Played “other group of monkeys” wrr call
➢First time, monkeys looked. After more calls, monkeys stopped looking
➢Played “other group of monkeys” chutter
➢Monkeys looked <2 seconds
Seem to extract the meaning from the call – calls can be referential
Alarm calls
Meerkats (Manser, 2001)
Have different alarm calls depending on the type of predator (aerial, terrestrial, recruitment)
Calls also include information about level of urgency
Cat-human communication
Susanne Schötz (Lund University) Meowsic
Schötz and van de Weijer (2014)
Human’s ability to classify meows (food related and vet related)
Accuracy was above chance (65%), humans who reported experience with cats (70%) were better than inexperienced humans (54%)
Cats use different intonation patterns
What is language
Definition (Pearce, 2008)
Arbitrariness of units
e.g., words usually randomly represent an event
Semanticity
there is a meaning
Displacement
communication about events distant in time or space
Productivity
structured according to rules but can be used flexibly
Teaching human language: Apes
American Sign Language (ASL) Gardner & Gardner (1969) Washoe (chimpanzee) Shaping and instrumental conditioning 132 signs after 5 years Combine signs? “water bird” for swan
Apes
Nim Chimpsky
Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, and Bever (1979)
By the end of the project, Nim could:
Produce 125 signs
Produce linear combinations (“utterances”)
1.1 – 1.6 words combined
A two-year old learns about 10 words every day
Apes
Visual symbols
Yerkish (Duane Rumbaugh)
Lana (chimpanzee) trained to use a keyboard. Symbols (lexigrams) have symbolic value but are arbitrary.
Sarah (chimpanzee; David Premack)
Plastic tokens, again arbitrary.
Words: Dogs
Pilley and Reid (2011) Chaser the dog
Trained on >1000 objects 4-5 hrs per day for 3 years
Proper nouns
Learned 1022 name-object pairs (8/8 for each object)
Monthly tests with 20 items (x5)
Nouns and commands
Responded to commands (take, paw, nose) and object
Common nouns (toy, ball , frisbee)
Correct for all categories (8/16)
New objects
Could pick out a new object
Sentences: Dolphins
Herman, Richards, and Wolz (1984)
Akeakamai (dolphin) trained to understand gestures
•Displaced reference tests:
Object – Action (81.4% correct)
•Semantically reversible sentences:
e.g., HOOP FETCH PIPE (go to hoop & take it to the pipe), PIPE FETCH HOOP (go to the pipe and take it to the hoop). 52.4% correct (0 reversal errors)
