Human evolution; possible recursion in monkeys (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 27, 2020, 19:19 (1400 days ago) @ David Turell

Not at all proven, but presented as part of the effort to make humans less different than they are. The so-called recursions are symbols monkeys are taught by habit to select and repeat, without the meanings we appreciate in speech in most languages:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/monkeys-may-share-key-grammar-related-skill-with-hu...

"In lab experiments, monkeys demonstrated an ability akin to embedding phrases within other phrases, scientists report June 26 in Science Advances. Many linguists regard this skill, known as recursion, as fundamental to grammar (SN: 12/4/05) and thus peculiar to people.

"But “this work shows that the capacity to represent recursive sequences is present in an animal that will never learn language,” says Stephen Ferrigno, a Harvard University psychologist.

"Recursion allows one to elaborate a sentence such as “This pandemic is awful” into “This pandemic, which has put so many people out of work, is awful, not to mention a health risk.”

***

"Three rhesus monkeys lacked humans’ ease on the task. But after receiving extra training, two of those monkeys displayed recursive learning, Ferrigno’s group says. One of the two animals ended up, on average, more likely to form novel recursive sequences than about three-quarters of the preschoolers and roughly half of the Bolivian villagers.

***

"Study participants were trained to arrange two sets of symbols in recursive patterns. Each training set consisted of four brackets — say, { } [ ] — with each bracket shown at random spots on a computer screen or on cards placed on a table. The goal was to learn to touch the four brackets in a recursive sequence with pairs of related forms in the center and on the ends, such as { [] }. Chimes for humans and food rewards for monkeys indicated when an individual had touched a recursive sequence.

"The researchers then tested whether humans and monkeys, without further training, would arrange new bracket sets, such as ()[], in a recursive pattern, say, ( [] ).

***

"Scientists familiar with the study find it fascinating but remain unconvinced that participants needed to understand recursion to learn the bracket sequences.

"Unlike recursive phrases in languages, which are meaningfully related to each other, pairs of inner and outer brackets in the task are arbitrary symbols, say cognitive scientists Claudia Männel and Emiliano Zaccarella, both of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. Participants might have correctly sequenced novel brackets without thinking about recursion, Männel and Zaccarella suggest. Perhaps subjects arranged items in a symmetric, visually pleasing way consistent with what they remembered from earlier trials.

***

"Monkeys, which generally can’t mentally keep track of as many pieces of information as people can, would struggle more than people to recall bracket orders, consistent with the animals’ poorer performance on the task, Dehaene argues.

"Everyone agrees on one thing — deciphering what makes human language special still presents a major scientific challenge."

Comment: the bold above is ridiculous example of the thought pattern behind the research. Of course we are wildly/widely different. True recursion requires complex thinking.