7 ms·

Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages

116 points by polm23 6y ago

acqq 6y ago
The Onion's take on crows research: https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough-not-to-let-on-how-s-1844081510 https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough... "Researchers Find Crows Smart Enough Not To Let On How Smart They Really Are"
- tsco77 6y ago
  I do believe that article should be about lab rats.
zwieback 6y ago
I read "Hollow Kingdom" a little while back, pretty good novel about how a crow that learned human language saves the world from a zombie invasion.
- abhgh 6y ago
  That sounded like such an unusual theme I had to go read up reviews :)
greeneggs 6y ago
Looking at the results, there doesn't seem to be a large difference between the two languages. And it is a very small sample size. I am not sure how to interpret it. Here is a link to the paper: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10 https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10 > Language discrimination has previously been found in human infants, cotton-top tamarin monkeys, rats, and java sparrows. This ability might also be relevant for the crow, a social passerine with extensive auditory perceptual skills living in close contact with humans…
monadic2 6y ago
Link to PDF: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...
sdenton4 6y ago
This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more interesting to me: https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-part-ii-qa/ https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-pa... Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...
- vmception 6y ago
  There was a movie where the aliens patiently let humans try to devise a way to teach a way to communicate, but they were teaching the humans a superior way of communicating the whole time. Would be a spoiler if I said the movie name and you hadn't seen it. I wouldn't be surprised if various domestic and cohabiting animals feel that way about us. A lot of what we do is built around verbal nuance but isn't really necessary to get the same results in our daily routine, acquiring goods or hunting, or sex. Analogous to how adult cats do not vocalize to each other (at least in a frequency we can hear), or a person that is into you doesn't really care what you say only the tone. Our hierarchy of needs and wants are a shared protocol already, and it is communicable to other people that don't speak the same language, other mammals, birds, and cephalopods without speaking.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Please post the spoiler in a few days, I have no idea but want to watch this.
    - vmception 6y ago
      google alien communication movie good luck
    - poulsbohemian 6y ago
      I think parent poster is referring to Arrival: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
seven4 6y ago
"As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!" I would be interested to hear the respective recordings - is it possible that something else in the speaker's voice (tone/manner/volume) that they were responding to? Edit: Ok so i went looking in the original paper which describes the method and it looks quite thought out - though i would still love to hear the recording or see the video footage. (https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...) "We used twenty Dutch and twenty Japanese sentences as stimuli. They were all declarative, adult-directed, approximately 2.5 seconds long, and spoken by four female native speakers. After the habituation to the aviary on three consecutive days, the crows were tested for their responses to the Dutch and Japanese stimuli in a total of eight trials which were distributed over four days (i.e., two trials per day). Four crows received Dutch stimuli for the first four trials and Japanese stimuli for the last four trials, while the other three crows were assigned the opposite language order. Before the start of each trial, the crows were given 3–5 min for familiarization to the surroundings. Each trial consisted of four blocks of stimulus presentation with inter-block intervals of a 1–2-min silent period. Within each block, a set of ten sentences spoken by two different speakers was continuously presented twice in a random order. A 30 min silent period was inserted between the trials each day. The trial schedule including stimulus presentation was controlled by the programme PsychoPy 3 (Peirce, 2007). The sound level was set at a range between 70 and 80 dB across the perches. According to the different behavioural responses to 1,000 Hz and 1,600 Hz tone......"
- polm23 6y ago
  For reference, this testing process is similar to a standard one used with human infants. This paper isn't one cited by the crow paper, it's just one I'm familiar with that uses a similar process; it may be connected to the crow paper through a citation chain, as some of their cites also deal with human infants. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926
m0zg 6y ago
Could be that they are simply responding to different ways of pronouncing vowels? This is something most ESL speakers have problems with, for example. I.e. the "o" sound in "love" is somewhere between the Russian "o" and "a", and "a" sound in "land" is somewhere between the Russian "a" and "э". English speakers are attuned to such minute differences. Russian speakers are not, which is why if you ask them to pronounce the word "fax", they'll pronounce it as "fucks". :-)
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Coq is a francophone's revenge (deniable in more than one way) for the bit.
ianai 6y ago
Between the zoonotic origins of covid (and just epidemiology generally) and the book “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are” by Franz de Waal I’m really resetting my understanding of life. Animals are just way way smarter than we give them credit for - not the least because of eons of telling ourselves we’re the living beings and they’re the automatons (seriously, go read how Descartes wrote about them). We’re also clearly made of largely similar systems and “parts” since bugs are capable of going between different organisms. Like getting viruses from bats or pangolins or chickens or ferrets to humans. The “software” and “hardware” must all be similar enough for us to a little more humility.
- forgotmyp77 6y ago
  watching animals closely and forming relationships with them has led me to some of the most profound, incredible experiences of my life. they can also be great teachers. and yes, our hardware and software is very similar, even insects and microbes. this is why *-cides are so dangerous.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  I have to disagree. I see the opposite problem. We think too highly of human intelligence, we should be more humble. Our most important source of intelligence is culture. We copy what we see others doing and that make us think that we are smart. It's the equivalent to see a Mathematical proof and think that we could also have done it. Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose weight or study an uninteresting topic. It took humanity one hundred thousand years to realize that writing symbols allowed for a good communication system. And we did that by copy and error, a kind of evolutive process. Nobody sit down for hours until they invented writing. So, you see the glass half full, I see it half empty, I guess. But there is usefulness in seeing the glass half empty. As, it makes us more aware of our lakings and biases. This opinion, I formed by reading many other opinions adding one more step on the evolution of knowledge (maybe I'm wrong and it's just a dead end thou)
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose weight Obesity is largely a function of culture.
wespiser_2018 6y ago
If crows are so smart, then why do they eat our garbage?
- inamberclad 6y ago
  Because they can make use of our calorie-dense refuse? Same reason rats gravitate to human civilization I guess.
- arkis22 6y ago
  they're smart. so they eat our garbage. we throw out what tonnage of good food a year?
- praptak 6y ago
  Because we are not smart enough to figure out how to stop being so wasteful?
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I guess the better question would be, if we are smart why are we throwing away so much useful stuff?
  - wespiser_2018 6y ago
    Yea, it's a joke. I guess it doesn't come across well, but if you say it in person while people are talking about crows, people will usually laugh :)
Markoff 6y ago
this reminds me racist dogs in Goa (India) been staying on beach, dogs very friendly towards me (your Aryan white), forming even circle around me when I sat down on beach in early morning, but God forbid (dark) looking local tried to go on beach, they scared him away. I noticed this actually in some other tourist places as well, dogs being friendly to tourists while aggressive with locals but if it makes anyone feel happy, dogs in Agra don't indiscriminate, I've seen them attacking badly local children same as they attacked me when going in morning to Taj Mahal, only place in India with aggressive dogs (towards me) I experienced
- klohto 6y ago
  How can a dog be racist? It has no prejudice and acts solely on previous experience.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Incorrect or unfair generalization from previous experience is prejudice. Pre-judging a novel scenario from biased information or processes is a functional definition of prejudice.
    - qw 6y ago
      I knew a dog (German Shepard) that was scared by another dog of a different breed (flat coated retriever) when she was young. The rest of her life she was really careful around dogs of the attacker's colour, and aggressive against dogs of the breed as the "bad" dog. If a dog was both the same colour and breed you had to hold the leash tight... I guess the dogs in Goa have similar experiences. They mostly associate tourists with giving them food and other positive experiences, but have maybe bad experiences from a few locals that have chased them away from their property etc. The individuals in the pack may not even have experienced anything bad, but have learned from the behaviour of other dogs that they should be careful
      - nineparts 6y ago
        And how many "few locals" is enough for prejudice to turn into statistic?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fuzzfactor 6y ago
A few years ago a lost dog came to our small laboratory parking lot from the nearby neighborhood. Not a real stray just a misplaced house dog, but it was more fearful than most. When somebody went out there and talked to it the dog hid underneath a parked car and would not come out. A few more people tried even bringing snacks but doggie wouldn't budge. After about ten more minutes another worker goes out there, looks under the car and talks to the dog in spanish, and the dog comes out wagging its tail. We do have many languages natively spoken by our people and up until that point none had come close to a spanish accent. And then there's this: basically a near-transcript of a Paul Harvey broadcast from the old ABC Radio https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-elephant https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-elephant
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

116 points by polm23 6y ago

acqq 6y ago

The Onion's take on crows research: https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough-not-to-let-on-how-s-1844081510 https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough... "Researchers Find Crows Smart Enough Not To Let On How Smart They Really Are"

tsco77 6y ago
I do believe that article should be about lab rats.

zwieback 6y ago

I read "Hollow Kingdom" a little while back, pretty good novel about how a crow that learned human language saves the world from a zombie invasion.

abhgh 6y ago
That sounded like such an unusual theme I had to go read up reviews :)

greeneggs 6y ago

Looking at the results, there doesn't seem to be a large difference between the two languages. And it is a very small sample size. I am not sure how to interpret it. Here is a link to the paper: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10 https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10 > Language discrimination has previously been found in human infants, cotton-top tamarin monkeys, rats, and java sparrows. This ability might also be relevant for the crow, a social passerine with extensive auditory perceptual skills living in close contact with humans…

monadic2 6y ago

Link to PDF: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...

sdenton4 6y ago

This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more interesting to me: https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-part-ii-qa/ https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-pa... Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...

vmception 6y ago
There was a movie where the aliens patiently let humans try to devise a way to teach a way to communicate, but they were teaching the humans a superior way of communicating the whole time. Would be a spoiler if I said the movie name and you hadn't seen it. I wouldn't be surprised if various domestic and cohabiting animals feel that way about us. A lot of what we do is built around verbal nuance but isn't really necessary to get the same results in our daily routine, acquiring goods or hunting, or sex. Analogous to how adult cats do not vocalize to each other (at least in a frequency we can hear), or a person that is into you doesn't really care what you say only the tone. Our hierarchy of needs and wants are a shared protocol already, and it is communicable to other people that don't speak the same language, other mammals, birds, and cephalopods without speaking.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Please post the spoiler in a few days, I have no idea but want to watch this.
  - vmception 6y ago
    google alien communication movie good luck
  - poulsbohemian 6y ago
    I think parent poster is referring to Arrival: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

seven4 6y ago

"As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!" I would be interested to hear the respective recordings - is it possible that something else in the speaker's voice (tone/manner/volume) that they were responding to? Edit: Ok so i went looking in the original paper which describes the method and it looks quite thought out - though i would still love to hear the recording or see the video footage. (https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...) "We used twenty Dutch and twenty Japanese sentences as stimuli. They were all declarative, adult-directed, approximately 2.5 seconds long, and spoken by four female native speakers. After the habituation to the aviary on three consecutive days, the crows were tested for their responses to the Dutch and Japanese stimuli in a total of eight trials which were distributed over four days (i.e., two trials per day). Four crows received Dutch stimuli for the first four trials and Japanese stimuli for the last four trials, while the other three crows were assigned the opposite language order. Before the start of each trial, the crows were given 3–5 min for familiarization to the surroundings. Each trial consisted of four blocks of stimulus presentation with inter-block intervals of a 1–2-min silent period. Within each block, a set of ten sentences spoken by two different speakers was continuously presented twice in a random order. A 30 min silent period was inserted between the trials each day. The trial schedule including stimulus presentation was controlled by the programme PsychoPy 3 (Peirce, 2007). The sound level was set at a range between 70 and 80 dB across the perches. According to the different behavioural responses to 1,000 Hz and 1,600 Hz tone......"

polm23 6y ago
For reference, this testing process is similar to a standard one used with human infants. This paper isn't one cited by the crow paper, it's just one I'm familiar with that uses a similar process; it may be connected to the crow paper through a citation chain, as some of their cites also deal with human infants. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926

m0zg 6y ago

Could be that they are simply responding to different ways of pronouncing vowels? This is something most ESL speakers have problems with, for example. I.e. the "o" sound in "love" is somewhere between the Russian "o" and "a", and "a" sound in "land" is somewhere between the Russian "a" and "э". English speakers are attuned to such minute differences. Russian speakers are not, which is why if you ask them to pronounce the word "fax", they'll pronounce it as "fucks". :-)

082349872349872 6y ago
Coq is a francophone's revenge (deniable in more than one way) for the bit.

ianai 6y ago

Between the zoonotic origins of covid (and just epidemiology generally) and the book “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are” by Franz de Waal I’m really resetting my understanding of life. Animals are just way way smarter than we give them credit for - not the least because of eons of telling ourselves we’re the living beings and they’re the automatons (seriously, go read how Descartes wrote about them). We’re also clearly made of largely similar systems and “parts” since bugs are capable of going between different organisms. Like getting viruses from bats or pangolins or chickens or ferrets to humans. The “software” and “hardware” must all be similar enough for us to a little more humility.

forgotmyp77 6y ago
watching animals closely and forming relationships with them has led me to some of the most profound, incredible experiences of my life. they can also be great teachers. and yes, our hardware and software is very similar, even insects and microbes. this is why *-cides are so dangerous.
Hokusai 6y ago
I have to disagree. I see the opposite problem. We think too highly of human intelligence, we should be more humble. Our most important source of intelligence is culture. We copy what we see others doing and that make us think that we are smart. It's the equivalent to see a Mathematical proof and think that we could also have done it. Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose weight or study an uninteresting topic. It took humanity one hundred thousand years to realize that writing symbols allowed for a good communication system. And we did that by copy and error, a kind of evolutive process. Nobody sit down for hours until they invented writing. So, you see the glass half full, I see it half empty, I guess. But there is usefulness in seeing the glass half empty. As, it makes us more aware of our lakings and biases. This opinion, I formed by reading many other opinions adding one more step on the evolution of knowledge (maybe I'm wrong and it's just a dead end thou)
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose weight Obesity is largely a function of culture.

wespiser_2018 6y ago

If crows are so smart, then why do they eat our garbage?

inamberclad 6y ago
Because they can make use of our calorie-dense refuse? Same reason rats gravitate to human civilization I guess.
arkis22 6y ago
they're smart. so they eat our garbage. we throw out what tonnage of good food a year?
praptak 6y ago
Because we are not smart enough to figure out how to stop being so wasteful?
cycomanic 6y ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I guess the better question would be, if we are smart why are we throwing away so much useful stuff?
- wespiser_2018 6y ago
  Yea, it's a joke. I guess it doesn't come across well, but if you say it in person while people are talking about crows, people will usually laugh :)

Markoff 6y ago

this reminds me racist dogs in Goa (India) been staying on beach, dogs very friendly towards me (your Aryan white), forming even circle around me when I sat down on beach in early morning, but God forbid (dark) looking local tried to go on beach, they scared him away. I noticed this actually in some other tourist places as well, dogs being friendly to tourists while aggressive with locals but if it makes anyone feel happy, dogs in Agra don't indiscriminate, I've seen them attacking badly local children same as they attacked me when going in morning to Taj Mahal, only place in India with aggressive dogs (towards me) I experienced

klohto 6y ago
How can a dog be racist? It has no prejudice and acts solely on previous experience.
- barrkel 6y ago
  Incorrect or unfair generalization from previous experience is prejudice. Pre-judging a novel scenario from biased information or processes is a functional definition of prejudice.
  - qw 6y ago
    I knew a dog (German Shepard) that was scared by another dog of a different breed (flat coated retriever) when she was young. The rest of her life she was really careful around dogs of the attacker's colour, and aggressive against dogs of the breed as the "bad" dog. If a dog was both the same colour and breed you had to hold the leash tight... I guess the dogs in Goa have similar experiences. They mostly associate tourists with giving them food and other positive experiences, but have maybe bad experiences from a few locals that have chased them away from their property etc. The individuals in the pack may not even have experienced anything bad, but have learned from the behaviour of other dogs that they should be careful
    - nineparts 6y ago
      And how many "few locals" is enough for prejudice to turn into statistic?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fuzzfactor 6y ago

A few years ago a lost dog came to our small laboratory parking lot from the nearby neighborhood. Not a real stray just a misplaced house dog, but it was more fearful than most. When somebody went out there and talked to it the dog hid underneath a parked car and would not come out. A few more people tried even bringing snacks but doggie wouldn't budge. After about ten more minutes another worker goes out there, looks under the car and talks to the dog in spanish, and the dog comes out wagging its tail. We do have many languages natively spoken by our people and up until that point none had come close to a spanish accent. And then there's this: basically a near-transcript of a Paul Harvey broadcast from the old ABC Radio https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-elephant https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-elephant

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]