To learn a language is to learn a set of all-purpose rules that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules – and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech.

In a series of experiments appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Gary Marcus and co-authors Keith Fernandes and Scott Johnson at New York University exposed infants to algebraically structured sequences that consisted of either speech syllables or non-speech sounds.

Once infants became familiar with these sequences, researchers presented the infants four new unique sequences: Two of these new sequences were consistent with the familiarization “grammar,” while two were inconsistent. (For example, given familiarization with la ta ta, ge lai lai, consistent test sentences would include wo fe fe and de ko ko (ABB), while inconsistent sentences would include wo wo fe and de de ko (AAB). Marcus and his colleagues then measured how long infants attended to each sequence in order to determine whether they recognized the previously learned grammar.

In the first two experiments, the researchers examined infants’ rule learning using sequences of tones, sung syllables, musical instruments of varying timbres and animal noises.

Across both experiments, infants were able to identify rules only when exposed to speech sequences (versus non-speech sequences). These findings are significant, says Marcus, because “the essence of language is learning rules, and these results suggest that young infants are specifically prepared to learn these rules from speech.

In the third experiment, the researchers discovered another intriguing result: Infants were able to generalize rules found in speech to sequences of non-speech sounds, even though they could not directly learn rules from the non-speech sequence.

Infants were then re-familiarized with structured sequences of speech and then tested on their ability to discriminate those same structures in tones, timbres, and animal sounds. Infants who received exposure to structured sequences of speech were able to recognize these same structures in the nonlinguistic stimuli. This shows, according to Marcus, that “infants’ drive to understand the abstract patterns underlying speech must be much stronger than their pull towards understanding abstraction in other domains”

“Infants may analyze speech more deeply than other signals because it is inherently capable of bearing meaning, or because it bears some not-yet-identified acoustic property that draws the attention of the rule-induction system” writes Marcus.

“Regardless, from birth, infants prefer listening to speech,” he continues, “and the intriguing patterns we have observed in rule learning and transfer could in some way be an extension of that initial, profound interest in speech.”

Source: APS

Full “Infant Rule Learning Facilitated by Speech” report attached.

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In order to comprehend the continuous stream of cacophonies and visual stimulation that battle for our attention, humans will breakdown activities into smaller, more digestible chunks, a phenomenon that psychologists describe as “event structure perception.”

Event structure perception was originally believed to be confined to our visual system, but new research published in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reports that a similar process occurs when reading about everyday events as well.

Nicole Speer and her colleagues at Washington University examined event structure perception by having subjects read narratives about everyday activities while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure neural activity. The subjects were then invited back a few days later to reread these same narratives, this time without the fMRI scan. Instead, they were asked to divide the narrative where they believed one segment of narrative activity ended and another segment began.

Speer, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, surmised that if changes in neural activity occurred at the same points that the subjects divided the stories, then it could be safe to suggest that humans are physiologically disposed to break down activities into narratives (remember that the same subjects had no idea during the first part of the experiment that they would later be asked to segment the story).

As expected, activity in certain areas of the brain increased at the points that subjects had identified as the beginning or end of a segment, otherwise known as an “event boundary.” Consistent with previous research, such boundaries tended to occur during transitions in the narrative such as changes of location or a shift in the character’s goals. Researchers have hypothesized that readers break down narrated activities into smaller chunks when they are reading stories. However, this is the first study to demonstrate that this process occurs naturally during reading, and to identify some of the brain regions that are involved in this process.

The fact that these results occurred with narratives that described mundane events is particularly important to our understanding of how humans comprehend everyday activity. Speer writes that the findings “provide evidence not only that readers are able to identify the structure of narrated activities, but also that this process of segmenting continuous text into discrete events occurs during normal reading.”

In addition, a subset of the network of brain regions that also responds to event boundaries while subjects view movies of everyday events was activated. Speer believes that “this similarity between processing of visual and narrated activities may be more than mere coincidence, and may reflect the existence of a general network for understanding event structure.” Future research will ultimately address the relationship between the two perception systems, and whether a global mechanism underlies event structure perception.

New research from Columbia’s Primate Cognition Laboratory has demonstrated for the first time that monkeys could acquire meta-cognitive skills: the ability to reflect about their thoughts and to assess their performance.

The study was a collaborative effort between Herbert Terrace, Columbia professor of psychology & psychiatry, and director of its Primate Cognition Laboratory, and two graduate students, Lisa Son — now professor of psychology at Barnard College — and UCLA postdoctoral researcher Nate Kornell.

The test used touch-screen technology and a multiple-choice format. Six novel photographs were presented at the beginning of each trial, one at a time. One photograph was selected at random and then displayed simultaneously with EIGHT novel photographs. The monkey’s task was to select the photograph that appeared at the beginning of the trial. The monkey then evaluated the accuracy of its choice by selecting a high and a low-risk icon presented on the screen. It earned a large reward if it selected the high-risk icon after a correct response (THREE tokens dropped into a bank displayed on the video monitor) Credit: Herbert Terrace-Columbia University

The study, which appears in the January issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, was designed to show that a monkey could express its confidence in its answers to multiple-choice questions about its memory based on the amount of imaginary currency it was willing to wager. Their experiment was derived from the observation that children often make pretend bets to assert that they know the answer to some question. According to Son, “the ability to reflect on one’s knowledge has always been thought of as exclusively human. We designed a task to determine if a non-human primate could similarly learn to express its confidence about its knowledge by making large or small wagers.”

In the experiment, two monkeys were trained to play a video game that would test their ability to remember a particular photograph while also allowing them to make a large or a small bet. Ultimately, this wager would reflect the monkey’s perception of their memory accuracy.

The test used touch-screen technology and a multiple-choice format. Six novel photographs were presented at the beginning of each trial, one at a time. One photograph was selected at random and then displayed simultaneously with 8 novel photographs. The monkey’s task was to select the photograph that appeared at the beginning of the trial. The monkey then evaluated the accuracy of its choice by selecting a high and a low-risk icon presented on the screen. It earned a large reward if it selected the high-risk icon after a correct response (3 tokens dropped into a bank displayed on the video monitor).

Choosing the high-risk icon following an incorrect response resulted in the loss of 3 tokens. Low risk bets were always followed by a small reward (a gain of 1 token). When the monkey accumulated enough tokens, it was rewarded with food. The results demonstrated that with the monkeys, there was a strong correlation between high-risk bets and correct responses and between low-risk bets and incorrect responses.

Terrace argues that, “the pattern of the monkeys’ bets provided clear evidence of their ability to engage in meta-cognition, an ability that is all the more remarkable because monkeys lack language.” But the results may have further reaching implications as well. Terrace notes “our results are of general interest because non-verbal tests of the type used in this and other experiments on animal cognition can be adapted to study cognitive abilities of infants and autistic children.”

Source: Association for Psychological Science.