linking back to brembs.net





Welcome Guest
Username:

Password:


Remember me

[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
 Currently Online (17)
 Extra Information
MicroBlog
NeuroTwitter

[15 Feb 10: 11:11]
W00t! Editor's selection at Researchblogging.org: http://researchblogging.org/news/?p=966

[11 Feb 10: 01:02]
Pharyngulated! http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/religion_adaptation_or_by-prod.php

[26 Jan 10: 12:28]
New Theme! What do you think? http://bjoern.brembs.net

[04 Dec 09: 08:25]
Rolled over 400 citations today... http://bjoern.brembs.net/citations.php

[17 Nov 09: 08:45]
Students! You tell them for 45 minutes why their papers have to be in IMRaD format and some still hand in garbled, structureless papers!

[28 Oct 09: 04:17]
The m.o. of university administrations: divide competence until you can never be mad at anyone, because there are always so many others who can be blamed.


Networking
Random Video
SciSites
GeoCounter
outils webmaster
After learning about smart rooks, there's a new story out on clever birds. This time, European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris, see image) are reported to "accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar". It essentially means that the animals have been trained to accoustically distinguish patterns such as ABAB from AABB. Or, more generally, to distinguish AnBn from (AB)n. See also Scotsman.com newsreport.


For me the important part of the study was the difference in the procedure to another study in which the researchers tried and failed to train tamarins (monkeys) the same distinction: in the tamarins, the animals were asked to distinguish the patterns after a brief exposure. In the starlings, the researchers trained them using an operant conditioning procedure involving extensive positive and negative feedback. The accompanying News and Views article suggests that maybe the operant control of the patterns is what makes starlings succeed and tamarins fail to acquire recursive grammar? I'll have to add this piece of evidence to my essay on operant conditioning.

Tags: , ,

Posted on Thursday 27 April 2006 - 07:49:04 comment: 0

Submit comment
Subject
Username:
Comment:

Render time: 0.7295 sec, 0.4916 of that for queries.