Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages | Hacker News Reader

Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages

corvidresearch.blog

116 pointspolm2350 comments

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

> Obesity is largely a function of culture.

It relates to sugary and fatty food availability. So, yes it's cultural and can be improved by improved the system.

But, its root is the incapability of human beings on avoiding the 'temptation' of unhealthy food.

Asking people to stop eating too much and too bad does not work because our survival instincts tell us that to not eat when you can is stupid. So, changes in availability of unhealthy food are needed to improve the population health.

Your point does not invalidate my point, but both describe our society.

Sure, and I didn't mean to come across as obtuse, my point was that it's hard to find truly culture-insensitive aspects of the human experience.

Even the basics like our tastes in food, and what traits we find physically attractive, are steered by culture. You're right of course that ultimately we're wired to enjoy sugar, fat, and salt, in a way that works against our health when they are available in effectively limitless quantities.

I don't agree with Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. We allow perfect strangers into our homes to fix the plumbing. (Bruce Schneier wrote a great book about this kind of trust. [0]) A baby can learn to enjoy the company of a Malamute. Even our instinct to avoid being eaten by wolves, seems to be negotiable.

> changes in availability of unhealthy food are needed to improve the population health.

Agreed.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/

>I don't agree with Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. We allow perfect strangers into our homes to fix the plumbing.

And we stay in the house to keep watch on them.

>A baby can learn to enjoy the company of a Malamute. Even our instinct to avoid being eaten by wolves,

You have to first establish that we have an instinct to avoid being eaten by wolves. And how that would work in humans that don't live where there are wolves for thousands of years.....

Hmmm. It's also a process of blind optimization on the part of companies that sell food. If they stumble into things that are addictive, that short-circuit the reward function in human appetite functions, they make more profit. Industrialization, marketing, high quality feedback mechanisms - they all add up to exploiting the human choice function.

Yes, industrialization of food is a function of culture. It's a tough one to fight against though, because marketing is also a culture generator; it needs constant oppositional effort.

If that is the case, then why are people in the same culture not equally fat?

Because it's not the only factor. Culture is an important factor but not the only one.

Income is another factor. Richer people had access to better food and better medical advice that pressures then to eat healthier.

Genetics are also another factor. Some people are better at accumulating fat than others.

That other elements does not remove cultural influence. You eat what is available to you in your region, what your parents cook, etc.

e.g. A country may tax sugary drinks to reduce availability and that reduces obesity in the country.

Culture is not a source of intelligence.

Intelligence is something you are born with, just like height or skin color.

I also do not understand who you refer to when you say "we." Well, I have a pretty good idea, but as opposed to "you," I prefer not to do mindless generalizations.

In the post-Enlightenment post-humanist West there is a tendency like yours to downplay the difference between humans and animals, but I think it misses the point. Intelligence is not the point.

Intelligence was never the categorical differentiator between humans and animals. Firstly, because it is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Some have said that "culture" is what makes us different, but I'm not convinced of that either - for me, highly sociable animals that travel in herds always appeared to have a culture of sorts. Again, a difference in degree, not in kind.

I tend to agree with the Russian philosophers that argue that the categorical differentiator between humans and animals is "morality". Animals are fundamentally amoral, i.e. nothing they do is "evil". We do not speak of incest, rape or murder among bonobo chimps, for example, because such judgements cannot apply to their actions (although this behaviour is rampant in nature). Moral judgements cannot apply to animals precisely because they have no transcendental purpose in any of their actions, i.e. everything they do is out instinct and survival purposes. Whereas humans frequently act out of a transcendental purpose, such as fighting for a greater cause such as equality for all, creating and worshipping a conception of God, or practicing philosophy. None of these actions have a survival motive (some are actually detrimental to our individual survival). Neither are these actions necessarily instinctual, as humans are certainly capable or creating new transcendental purposes that didn't exist before - and THAT is what makes us human.

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-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...

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.

Please post the spoiler in a few days, I have no idea but want to watch this.

google alien communication movie

good luck

I think parent poster is referring to Arrival: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

The book was better :)

As somebody who loves both, I recommend watching the movie before reading the short story; IMO there's something the viewer only gradually understands in the movie that's explicit up front in the story.

If you are talking about the movie that I think you are talking about, I don't think it is really so much about a superior way of communicating, just a different one.

It was superior to what the humans were trying to teach the visitors which was more akin to putting a primate through a communication test.

If you haven't read him, this spectacular failure is the central theme of many of Stanislaw Lem's works. Worth a read if you like sci-fi.

"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_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......"

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

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.

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

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

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". :-)

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

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

How can a dog be racist? It has no prejudice and acts solely on previous experience.

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.

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

And how many "few locals" is enough for prejudice to turn into statistic?

For a dog, one bad experience can be enough. They can also spread their behaviour to other dogs that notice that they are afraid in certain situations. These dogs will "teach" other dogs and the behaviour spreads quickly.

Yep, animals learn from bad experiences quite fast. My little parrot won't go near towels anymore because we used to wrap him in one so he would hold still while trimming his nails. This doesn't hurt the bird and not doing it makes it hard for them to walk, but the sounds and struggle emmited by that pint sized green cheeked conure would make the unaware think I was torturing him.

Now, he won't even let us wrap him in a towel after he decides to dunk himself in his water bowl for a bath. No matter how wet, cold and pathetic he looks (birds smell like a wet potato after a bath), he won't let us dry him off.

how do they trim them in wild?

Wild birds climb trees etc. more than captive birds. The reason nails grow is that they are not used as much as they would naturally.

The other commenter sums it up--they have many more coarse/rough items to cling onto in the wild. We leave plenty of items like that in his cage as well, but he's very particular about where he perches and what he perches on. Parrots can be very set in their ways and takes a lot of work at times to introduce them to new things in their routine.

Also have to keep their beak grounded down for similar reasons. It's quite sharp and he's learned he can use it as a weapon when he's not getting his way. Imagine a 2 year old human that isn't afraid to poke you with a sharp stick when they don't get their metaphorical candy. That's pretty much my parrot.

It's kind of like sharing a space with the world's biggest (and smallest/cutest) curmudgeon at times (parrots are cranky when they don't get enough sleep). He loves me and my SO, though he loves her more than me, even though he's technically my parrot. Parrots are kind of like us in that they pick and choose who they love and make you work for it.

I can say having a parrot as a pet is a drastically different experience than I've had with cats, dogs or rodents.

It's not about intent, it's about giving/expecting every experience a 50/50 chance of going well or poorly. Obviously animals (or even instinct-driven people) are not going to adhere to this "by default".

For example, even if you were robbed 9 straight times on a particular street by a particular "type" of person (whatever that means)...you should not expect the 10th time to go the same. Similarly if a positive experience happens you can't expect the 10th to go the same either.

It's always been very difficult to reconcile with "situational awareness" for me...because the two are apparently mutually exclusive. Perhaps someone smarter than me (AKA everyone reading this) can help here.

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

> 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…

The Onion's take on crows research:

https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough...

"Researchers Find Crows Smart Enough Not To Let On How Smart They Really Are"

I do believe that article should be about lab rats.

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

Because they can make use of our calorie-dense refuse? Same reason rats gravitate to human civilization I guess.

they're smart. so they eat our garbage.

we throw out what tonnage of good food a year?

Because we are not smart enough to figure out how to stop being so wasteful?

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?

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 :)

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

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