Journal Club 1 Flashcards
What is cross-modal object recognition?
Ability to use information acquired with one particular sensory system to recognize object with another one
What is the first condition for cross modal object recognition
The information provided by the two sense has to match in content
What is another way of saying “the information provided by the two sense has to match in content”
Both sense hae to provide information about the same characteristic object property such as shape, surface, structure
What is the second condition for cross modal object recognition
The sensory inputs have to be encoded in a way that allows temporally disjointed information from two senses to be identified as identical, despite these senses relying on different physical stimuli
What is the third condition for cross modal object recognition
Characteristic object features have to be stored in a neuronal representation that is accessible by multiple senses
Before this paper, what type of animals had cross modal recognition been found in
Vertebrates: mammals and fish
Which animals have vision/touch transfer
humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, monkeys, and rats
Which animals have been shown to have non vision/touch transfer
Elephantnose fish and bottlenose dolphin
What type of transfer does the elephantnose fish have
Vision/electric sense
What type of transfer does the dolphin have
Vision/echolocation
What was the first thing they did in this experiment?
Trained bees to discriminate between sphere and cube, either using vision only or touch only
What happened with the bees in the first step
Bees learnt through experience whether sphere or cube contained the reward (sucrose solution). THey learnt to associate one of the shapes with the reward
What was the second step of this experiment
Bees were tested on a choice between sphere and cube, either in the same modality or in the other modality only
What happened in the testing phase
Regocnition of the correct object shape (the previously rewarding one) was measured as the proportion of time the bees spent in contact with the objects of that shape
What happened if the amount of time the bees spent in contact with the object of the correct shape was above chance level
They concluded that they recognized the object
What was the % of the time that the bees had to spend with the correct object for it to be above the chance level
50%
What was the final outcome of the paper
THe bees were above chance level, as they spent longer with the previously rewarding object than with the non-rewarding one in all four conditions
What was the control condition
Training with vision only or touch only; testing with neither vision nor touch
What was the the expected outcome
Bees shouldnt be able to recognize previously rewarding object when neither visual nor tactile info was available during tested. They expected them to perform at a chance level.
What were the conclusions of this experiment
bees can recognize object by vision alone, even if they have only touched them in the dark and can recognize objects by touch alone, even if they have only seen the object.
What do the conclusions of this experiment mean
bees are able to perform cross-modal object recognition
What four bullet points summarize the conclusion
Bees perform multisensory integration between visual and tactile domains
Their brain may form abstract representations of objects
Such mental imagery may be a building block of consciousness
Worth bearing in mind: bees have 1 million nerve cells; humans have 80 billion
