5 ms·
Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks
- verteu 8mo agoPreprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1....
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoBelieve it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of civilization.
- boppo1 8mo agoPlease elaborate.
- goodJobWalrus 8mo ago[flagged]
- teraflop 8mo agoAn interesting explanation that happens to be completely hallucinated. That line doesn't appear anywhere in either the play or the movie.
- goodJobWalrus 8mo agoha, ha, and they say AI does not hallucinate anymore!
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoThis is irony. The study is stupid, society has reached a stupid stage of development. Kiki and bouba explain nothing and serve nothing. Culture is in shambles.
- mastercheif 8mo agoOkay Gemini
- ChrisClark 8mo agoIf you don't recognize a quote, it's obviously AI? Might want to rethink your logic, or outsource it to AI. Might help you
- a115ltd 8mo agoThis is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary: language is far from arbitrary labels for things.
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago>language is far from arbitrary labels for things I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the sign. Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled." The fact there are systematic tendencies among languages in how things are called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign, they could have been called other things. We can also decide to refer to things by another name and we can use any arbitrary name we like! There is no limits on what names we can use (besides silly physiological constraints like having a word with 50 000 consonants). But, of course, there's much more to language than just labels! For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-à-vis language is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our language.
- naniwaduni 8mo agoArbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any significant predictive power in its own right.
- suddenlybananas 8mo agoLet's call the arbitrariness of the sign, blinga. Why do you think blinga requires "epicycles"? Blinga makes pretty modest claims: there is no requirement that the form of a sign matches that which it signifies in any way.
- downboots 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
- andrewflnr 8mo ago
- tetris11 8mo agoWhat's the N value of this study
- shermantanktop 8mo agoI don’t know, but it really should be in units of N dozen.
- Recursing 8mo agoFrom the preprint linked above: > We tested a total of 42 subjects, 17 of which were females.
- selridge 8mo agoThe published one repeated the experiment w/ day old chicks and IIRC the same number w/ the same results, so it's got a little more N than the preprint.
- thesmtsolver2 8mo agoAll the universal translators in fiction make more sense now lol.
- jaffa2 8mo agoI think it’s natural to think of this in terms of frequencies so the kiki shape has a higher visual frequency. As does the word have a higher audio frequencies within in than bouba so that is naturally associated with the lower frequency undulating line of that shape.
- downboots 8mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280619 it's a good analogy.
- alienbaby 8mo agoIs this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains fricatives and stops or not? They produce spiky sounds But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency? I'd be interested on results of shapes imagined when you take the source as musical or other non speech sounds.
- selridge 8mo ago>But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined. Because we failed to replicate this experiment on other primates, we couldn't avoid a semantic suspicion about those associations. Now we probably have to set semantics aside or let it get a lot weirder, because we can replicate across ~300My. >surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency? Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the best framing, but the representation could also carry harder to think about things like "harm". It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was chosen due to methodological convenience for linguists and cultural anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not neuroscientists or signal processing folks. We could potentially find other experiments quickly, since chicks are a model organism and the mechanism is clear. Things could move fast here.
- canjobear 8mo ago> But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency? Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being sharp in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing. There's no guarantee any given organism would make the connection.
- oasisaimlessly 8mo agoI don't think it's abstract at all. Rub something sharp (anything from a stick to a phonograph needle) on an object and you'll directly transcribe its spatial frequency spectrum into an audio frequency spectrum.
- gnarlouse 8mo agobaba is keke
- the__alchemist 8mo agobaba is you
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- keyle 8mo agoI'm not entirely sold by this discovery. For example when you learn to train dogs, you learn about the 3 voices. Encouraging voice, atta boy, negative voice, more stern, and the big "NO!". To some degree these words type sounding language are doing the same thing. Some sounds will irk, some will soothe, and it would affect this 'evidence' found.
- spagettnet 8mo agoI think the researchers agree with your premise. The “evidence” is not that chicks have more language understanding than previously understood, but rather that the source of the universality of bouba/kiki is due to something more primitive than built in human language hardware.
- patcon 8mo agoI'm very intrigued by this, but I'll be much more interested when this is replicated on non-domesticated animals...! It must take some strange things to survive co-evolution with humans for several thousands years
- bad_username 8mo agoObjects that have sharp edges generate higher frequency harmonics when agitated, because lower-size features resonate on higher frequencies (like shorter strings ring on higher pitch). Objects that are round resonate on low frequencies only. The "kiki" sound has more high frequency content than the "bouba" sound, and it's no mystery why the brain associates one with the other.
- mnbs 8mo agoThat's what I was thinking. But then I was wondering: if it was that obvoius, would there be such research about it?
- ACCount37 8mo agoYou do need to research "obvious" things every once in a while. They have this annoying tendency of being proven wrong occasionally.
- rcxdude 8mo agoIt's a hypothesis. How would you prove or disprove that it's because of that? (and I would say, a priori, it's not utterly obvious that the brain would relate spacial and temporal frequencies like this)
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoSome of the research, including this paper, is trying to get at the question of whether a species' sensitivity to the bouba-kiki effect might be at the root of language or not. Since it seems accepted that chickens do not have language in any meaningful sense of that term, finding that they still show this effect decouples it from "the origins of language".
- bondarchuk 8mo agoIt shows that bouba-kiki is not sufficient, but it doesn't show that it is not necessary.
- Strilanc 8mo agoFor each chick they do 24 trials divided into 4 blocks with retraining on the ambiguous shape and actual rewards after each block. During the actual tests they didn't give rewards. In figure 1 they show the data bucketed by trial index. It's a bit surprising it doesn't show any apparent effect vs trial number, e.g. the first trial after retraining being slightly different. I have to admit I'm super skeptical there's not some stupid mistake here. Definitely thought provoking. But I wish they'd kept iteratively removing elements until the correlation stopped happening, so they could nail down causation more precisely.
- rubidium 8mo agoI do agree my skepticism level rises extremely high in any experimental psychology experiment. There’s just so many ways to bias results, in addition to “do enough experiments and one of them will get a statistically unlikely result” problem. This group does a lot like this https://www.dpg.unipd.it/en/compcog/publications https://www.dpg.unipd.it/en/compcog/publications … so that’s tempting to think they keep trying things until something odd happens (kind of like physicists who look for 5th forces… eventually they find something odd but often it’s just an experimental issue they need to understand further).
- K0balt 8mo agoI wonder if this is a result of a Fourier transform type operation that turns the serial time domain into something that can be processed in parallel?
- saalweachter 8mo agoAs someone with a passing familiarity with both baby chicks and experimental setups, I have strong doubts about this research.
- crazydoggers 8mo agoVery likely this experiment suffered from a lack of thorough double blind control. Researcher bias may have generated subtle subconscious queues to the chicks on which shape to pick unrelated to the sounds.
- bondarchuk 8mo agoI see several people say primates don't show the effect, however all tests on primates were done with a "language-competent bonobo" and "touchscreen trained chimpanzees (N=6) and gorillas (N=2)" that are first trained to do various language/picture association tasks and then tested like how you'd test humans. It would be interesting to test primates using the same methodology they used here on chickens. The previous language/computer training in the monkeys might have interfered with a more low-level/intuitive bouba-kiki effect. References here https://evolang.org/jcole2022/proceedings/papers/JCoLE2022_paper_169.pdf https://evolang.org/jcole2022/proceedings/papers/JCoLE2022_p...