A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes

Not sure about crows, but there is this with songbirds:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1207207109

How would they survive without?

What is “sequential memory” if I may ask a stupid question? (Other than memory that is ordered.. sequentially)

And the title is "A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes" which is way more fitting for a study based on a few bonobos.

It's too easy to accuse every such article of arrogance - after all, something is obviously different, especially given that crows and apes didn't take over the planet long before humans existed. It's fair enough to look for it.

> We can get over that too if we consider that we may not be that special.

Speak for yourself. I trust my mother knows what she's talking about.

How about humans being unique in forming machine-building societieswith cultures containing some technology?

It’s possible that there are worldviews other than your own that are true

So far humans have behaved like any other species, we use all our qualities for our own ‘survival’. So no, we are not that special ;)

Humans use of language is way beyond any other known life form. Same for tool use. Saying they are the same as humans is like saying a tsunami and a ripple on a lake from a pebble are both waves.

> Gotta love the never ending hunt for things that are uniquely human.

To be fair, I've never seen any other member of the animal kingdom drunkenly light their own farts.

I suggest such actions (a combination of drug use, mastery of fire, intellect (however limited) and social bonding) define our humanity.

> For a while, we thought it was language and then discovered that it wasn't.

When did this happen? I only studied linguistics at the undergrad level, but as of about 5 years ago, animal language has not made it there other than some examples of 'here are some non-human communication systems, and this is of they differ from language'.

It is not plausible to say that linguists are simply too egotistical to consider the possibility. Scientists in general love animal models. Plenty of linguists would jump at the chance to conduct experiments that are way too unethical to do with human subjects.

There is some promising research into whale songs which might turn out to be analgous. However, as far as I have been able to find, our understanding there is still largely speculative.

This narrative that "there is nothing uniquely human" is just a grift originating with a handful anthropologists, who tried to claw some academic fame, by challenging the consensus. It is a catchy contrarian take. But it's very obviously naive. Yes, ants can organise their community, apes can break walnuts with a stone, dolphins can communicate their foraging wisdom to offspring, prairie dogs have a rich vocabulary to communicate their experiences. However, no species demonstrates either of these skills as a boundless process. For example, no species has approached levels of abstraction such as: a derivatives financial market; a meta-idea such as "this is a conversation"; the concept of a "concept" itself; or mythology. And while certain animals might be able to demonstrate far more effective problem-solving in their special environment (such as cephalopods), the features that set humans apart are generalisable across environments and explain the evolutionary advantage.

I think, it's a mix of the right abilities that make us unique.

Walking absurdly long distances without pause, throwing things very precisely, not killing each other when in huge groups, autonomous temperature control.

No

Here's a BBC video showing how good chimpanzees are with short-term memory. Short version, the chimp beats all humans at the memory test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXP8qeFF6A

I remember reading somewhere this was for juvenile chimps only, and they lost the ability as they matured.

The paper [1] makes a kind of subtle distinction that these aren't sequences, because the information is all presented at once:

> We do not focus on how animals represent single stimuli, or many stimuli that are presented simultaneously. For these reasons, test paradigms that involve simultaneously presented arrays of stimuli are beyond the scope of this study [39, 40], as responding to simultaneous input does not require the recognition of temporal stimulus sequences, even if subjects perform behavior sequences in response to complex input [41]. This also applies to the well-known studies where chimpanzees learned to point to the location of up to nine numerals that were presented simultaneously (see [42, 43] for studies on chimpanzees, and [44–46] for further discussion about these results).

Indeed, the videos of chimps casually acing those tests shows that all the numbers are given at once, and only disappear when the 1 is touched -- the test is getting the positions of 2 through 9 in the right order without being able to see them. The authors of the paper seem to argue that this is different from memorizing information that is presented sequentially.

That said, this does feel like an incorrect finding for other reasons. For example, some gulls seem to rely heavily on scents to navigate, learning a route of thousands of kilometers by a sequence of scent landmarks [2]. This information is presented to them in sequence and seems like a counterexample to my layman's eye.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[2] https://www.icarus.mpg.de/30188/seagulls-navigation

I wonder if this is a more extreme manifestation of the common experience of losing sense of time passing when high, often thinking that something is taking a very long time while actually not taking very long.

LLMs are a human technology.