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>In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen. When the crows pecked a correct
by njfkdnsffdsnfj 4y ago
>In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen. When the crows pecked a correct sequence, a chime sounded and the birds were rewarded with birdseed pellets or mealworms. If they pecked an incorrect sequence, a buzzer blared and the screen went dark for two seconds before the training resumed.
>After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.
That was the study
>“Our research suggests that recursion isn’t the sole difference between human and animal cognitive ability.”
I don't think anyone seriously thought this
>Dr. Chomsky said he wasn’t convinced the crow study or earlier work including Dr. Ferrigno’s monkey study demonstrated recursion. He said he believes the ability is innate, not learned.
>Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”
Not sure if this is what he means but I also believe the crow's recursion here may not be the same as that of a human. It is possible that the crows are doing the recursion in software, so to speak, and this software is compiled into the crows brain differently from the human, which calls the recursion instruction directly, so to speak. Then the crow might not scale to more complex tasks. This said, I'm sure now that they have found this ability of the crow more complex studies will be held to understand the nature and extent of the crow's ability. It has opened a new area of investigation.
- bitwize 4y agoThe idea that the ability to grok recursive structures is due to some part of human physiology that is unique to humans is pretty much taken as a given in Chomskyan linguistics, almost to the point of religious belief -- it's Chomsky's organ kundabuffer. Ask a Chomskyist to identify this organ or structure and they will handwave: "Well, we don't know exactly what or where it is but we know it's there, humans have it and animals don't so nyeh. We've prebunked any promising animal language study you can produce."
- timeon 4y agoI do not want to be that guy but is not Chomskyan linguistics an animal language study since it concerns humans? It seems strange to me that one would think that ie. birds are more closely related to other mammals then other mammals are to humans.
- technothrasher 4y agoObviously here, animal means non-human animal. If, as Chompsky proposes, humans have evolved a unique structure for language processing that no other animal has, then it is irrelevant how closely or distantly related any other animal is to us. Relation would only be important if Chomsky is correct about the structure but wrong about it evolving in humans rather than in the pre-human evolutionary line.
- inglor_cz 4y agoWe may well have a special structure for language processing, but Chomsky's claim that it is unique may be wrong. Convergent evolution is a thing in nature, some structures evolved independently multiple times. Humans and octopuses have very similar eyes, which emerged from different structures. I wouldn't be surprised if corvids developed human-like intelligence traits independently.
- marcosdumay 4y ago> is pretty much taken as a given in Chomskyan linguistics That he believes in it is irrelevant. His linguistics do not require the feature to be absent in animals, only that humans have it. Chomsky is famous for having some extremely insightful ideas that are important in several areas; and also for holding a lot of extremely stupid ones that are ridiculed by several areas. We don't throw the first set away because of the second.
- naniwaduni 4y agoBeing right more often than a stopped clock doesn't make you a good timepiece either, though.