2004-11-30
Teaching adaptive language to other primates
Teaching language to other primates.
>"If monkey brains have redundant capacity, why not human brains? 'Human
>language and intelligence could be brought up to a much higher level than
>we are at now,' he says. 'We are still in the middle of evolution. We can
>dream of the future.'"
>
>
>Aping Dr Dolittle
>
>A Japanese researcher reckons he will soon have monkeys communicating with
>humans. And, Laura Spinney finds, it could reveal how language evolved.
>
>Thursday November 25, 2004
>The Guardian
>
>In a laboratory in Saitama, central Japan, monkeys are behaving strangely.
>If someone sticks out a tongue, they do the same. If a person goes to
>unclip the latch on a box, the monkeys follow suit. If they need a rake to
>reach a piece of fruit, they ask for it with a special call. All of which
>is confounding experts, because none of it should be possible. Monkeys in
>the wild rarely ape, and as far as we know, they never, ever, ask for rakes.
>
>The Japanese macaques raised in Atsushi Iriki's lab are not particularly
>gifted. But intriguingly, he expects them soon to be communicating with
>him vocally, using simple linguistic rules. This isn't just an elegant Dr
>Dolittle curiosity: it holds the real possibility of understanding autism
>in humans and unlocking the vast unused power of the human brain.
>
>Iriki, head of the laboratory for symbolic cognitive development at the
>Riken Brain Science Institute, says his experiment will tap into neural
>systems monkeys always had, but have never been activated. He hopes to
>learn something about monkey thought, but more dramatically, about how
>language emerged in humans -and what happens when it breaks down in
>autistic children, for example.
>
>So what lies behind Iriki's attempt? As the ape brain evolved, it
>accumulated the components of a language. By the time the vocal tract
>could support speech, we were already human. But our brains, according to
>Iriki, were "language-ready" much earlier. In the monkey, this happened in
>a more fragmented form. The only reason it did not emerge was that the
>conditions were never right. "Maybe in the wild, vocal communication was
>not necessary for monkeys to survive, or was even harmful," says Iriki.
>"Those functions were not expressed or were even suppressed, even though
>their brains were furnished with the machinery."
>
>Iriki knew that monkeys would never be able to speak, lacking as they do
>the necessary vocal apparatus, but he became convinced he could perhaps
>exchange meaningful coos and grunts with them. To do so, he realised he
>would have to rear monkeys in an environment where to communicate in this
>way was not only safe, but in their interest. Could he encourage them to
>vocalise a primitive language? Would they use it to communicate not only
>with other monkeys, but even with him?
>
>The experiment has excited his peers and won Iriki the Golden Brain Award,
>presented annually for brain research by the Minerva Foundation in the US.
>"This is a guy who is on to a really exciting research programme," says
>neuroscientist Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California.
>Monkeys in the wild produce a limited range of calls - alarm calls to warn
>of approaching predators, for instance. But, says Arbib, "the general
>consensus would be that the set of calls is pretty much innate. Iriki now
>seems to show that the call system may be much more flexible than we thought".
>
>Iriki has a reputation for lateral thinking. Trained as a dental surgeon,
>he became interested in pain and by that route came to study the brain.
>Several years ago, he showed that a macaque trained to use a rake to grab
>a piece of fruit could operate just as skillfully whether it could see its
>own hand, or was prevented from seeing it and shown instead a video image
>of the hand, rake and fruit reward.
>
>Based on those findings, Iriki argued that monkeys had a concept of body
>image that matched a nine-year-old child. The findings seemed to
>demonstrate a level of abstract thinking that nobody had suspected in
>monkeys - though researchers had long argued for it in chimps, orang utans
>and gorillas. And they created a dilemma for Iriki.
>
>The problem was this: if monkeys have a relatively advanced view of
>themselves, how is it that they appear to be so oblivious to the behaviour
>of others, unable to follow the gaze of another monkey or imitate
>gestures, as even human toddlers can do? It mattered to Iriki because
>imitation and joint attention are considered key building blocks of the
>kind of shared understanding that makes communication possible. In the
>wild, monkeys rarely imitate. But two pieces of evidence suggested to
>Iriki that they could learn to - and they hinge on a recently discovered
>type of brain cell called a "mirror neuron".
>
>Animal behaviour experts have very occasionally observed both imitation
>and joint attention - which lets one follow another's gaze - between
>mother and infant macaques in the wild. And, though macaques seem to show
>no interest in others' actions, activity in their brains suggests they do.
>It harbours a type of neuron that fires not only when it performs an
>action, but also when it sees another monkey perform the same action.
>
>These mirror neurons were first identified by Giacomo Rizzolatti of the
>University of Parma, Italy, and colleagues in the early 1990s in an area
>of the macaque brain called the premotor cortex, and specifically in a
>sub-section called F5. Subsequently they have turned up in other areas.
>Luciano Fadiga at the University of Ferrara then found evidence that the
>human brain contained a mirror system of its own.
>
>When Rizzolatti's group investigated the human brain more closely, using
>functional magnetic resonance imaging, they showed that, among other
>places, mirror neurons show up in Broca's area, which in the human brain
>is responsible for speech production. F5 in monkeys is associated mainly
>with hand movements, but is the anatomical equivalent of Broca's area.
>
>There followed frenzied speculation about the role of mirror neurons.
>Rizzolatti and Arbib claimed that by providing the platform for imitation
>and shared understanding, they made language possible. Nevertheless, the
>question remained for Iriki: if humans and monkeys have mirror neurons,
>why are humans natural mimics while monkeys hardly ever imitate?
>
>"Maybe monkey brains are unaware of the mirror neurons' potential," he
>says. "When their brains realised the possible uses of this system,
>perhaps due to the expression of a gene trig gered by some accidental
>incident in the course of evolution, that could have been the beginning of
>the explosion of intelligent functions."
>
>Iriki suspects that a likely trigger for that realisation was human
>child-rearing practices. Using eye contact, mothers teach their babies to
>look in the same direction and to copy their actions. So in Iriki's lab,
>monkeys are reared as closely as possible to humans, with an intense
>relationship between the young monkey and its human carer.
>
>In a study published last year, his group showed that three in four
>monkeys brought up in this way learned joint attention, and once they had
>learned it, began to imitate a human's actions without having to be taught.
>
>Iriki is not the only scientist to experiment in this area. At Georgia
>State University, Atlanta, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has taught a
>human-reared pygmy chimp to become adept at communicating with symbols.
>But the difference is that Iriki's macaques choose their own calls to
>express what they want. When he trained two macaques to use a rake to
>retrieve a fruit reward, and then to call for either food or the tool, he
>found the monkeys produced different cooing noises depending on what they
>wanted. "I think this is the evolutionary precursor of naming," he says.
>
>Psychologist Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St Andrews says that
>what Iriki reports is new: monkeys are not known to produce acoustically
>distinct sounds associated with novel events or objects - certainly not
>with a man-made tool.
>
>Zuberbühler studies Campbell's and Diana monkeys in West Africa, whose
>calls are innate. "The acoustic structures of the different predator calls
>vary from one monkey species to the next, but those species are still able
>to understand each other," he says.
>
>By contrast, Iriki's monkeys' new calls do not yet have much communicative
>power. Each monkey has a different call for a given object, and the sounds
>are not the same. Iriki thinks it might be possible to teach naive monkeys
>to imitate the calls of others, and in so doing, help them learn what they
>mean. They might then use the calls themselves, to express the same idea.
>He can envisage, say, a macaque calling to another macaque for a tool,
>which is then dutifully handed over.
>
>"This is fascinating," says Fadiga, who thinks Iriki's work has the
>potential to reveal the origins of human language. But he also has doubts,
>not least that the monkeys will maintain any primitive language they
>develop. "The question is, do you think the monkeys need this language?
>Because if they do not need it, they will not teach others."
>
>Rizzolatti, meanwhile, is excited by the possibility that monkeys have
>mirror neurons but are unable to use them. "That has some interesting
>implications," he says. "For instance, perhaps autistic children have the
>mirror system but cannot use it. Or perhaps it is there, but not fully
>developed."
>
>One common symptom among autistic children is that they repeat words
>spoken to them without apparently understanding them - a phenomenon known
>as echolalia. At the same time, their language development is delayed,
>suggesting their mirror system may be malfunctioning. Rizzolatti
>speculates one could use tricks similar to Iriki's to improve the system's
>functioning in those kids.
>
>Iriki does not think it too far-fetched to suggest that humans could one
>day tune into his monkeys' enriched repertoire of sounds, using it to
>converse with them at a simple level. Then there will be a debate as to
>whether it deserves to be called language.
>
>"I think it's going to remain the case that language as we know it in
>humans is different from language that even the best brought-up ape is
>going to get to," says Arbib.
>
>But Iriki is already thinking laterally again. If monkey brains have
>redundant capacity, why not human brains? "Human language and intelligence
>could be brought up to a much higher level than we are at now," he says.
>
>"We are still in the middle of evolution. We can dream of the future."
>
>Further reading:
>
>www.brain.riken.go.jp/english/ Atsushi Iriki at the Laboratory for
>Symbolic Cognitive Development, Riken, Saitama, Japan
>
>Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language by Maxim Stamenov
>and Vittorio Gallese, 2002 paperback (John Benjamins, Amsterdam). ISBN
>1588112152
>"If monkey brains have redundant capacity, why not human brains? 'Human
>language and intelligence could be brought up to a much higher level than
>we are at now,' he says. 'We are still in the middle of evolution. We can
>dream of the future.'"
>
>
>Aping Dr Dolittle
>
>A Japanese researcher reckons he will soon have monkeys communicating with
>humans. And, Laura Spinney finds, it could reveal how language evolved.
>
>Thursday November 25, 2004
>The Guardian
>
>In a laboratory in Saitama, central Japan, monkeys are behaving strangely.
>If someone sticks out a tongue, they do the same. If a person goes to
>unclip the latch on a box, the monkeys follow suit. If they need a rake to
>reach a piece of fruit, they ask for it with a special call. All of which
>is confounding experts, because none of it should be possible. Monkeys in
>the wild rarely ape, and as far as we know, they never, ever, ask for rakes.
>
>The Japanese macaques raised in Atsushi Iriki's lab are not particularly
>gifted. But intriguingly, he expects them soon to be communicating with
>him vocally, using simple linguistic rules. This isn't just an elegant Dr
>Dolittle curiosity: it holds the real possibility of understanding autism
>in humans and unlocking the vast unused power of the human brain.
>
>Iriki, head of the laboratory for symbolic cognitive development at the
>Riken Brain Science Institute, says his experiment will tap into neural
>systems monkeys always had, but have never been activated. He hopes to
>learn something about monkey thought, but more dramatically, about how
>language emerged in humans -and what happens when it breaks down in
>autistic children, for example.
>
>So what lies behind Iriki's attempt? As the ape brain evolved, it
>accumulated the components of a language. By the time the vocal tract
>could support speech, we were already human. But our brains, according to
>Iriki, were "language-ready" much earlier. In the monkey, this happened in
>a more fragmented form. The only reason it did not emerge was that the
>conditions were never right. "Maybe in the wild, vocal communication was
>not necessary for monkeys to survive, or was even harmful," says Iriki.
>"Those functions were not expressed or were even suppressed, even though
>their brains were furnished with the machinery."
>
>Iriki knew that monkeys would never be able to speak, lacking as they do
>the necessary vocal apparatus, but he became convinced he could perhaps
>exchange meaningful coos and grunts with them. To do so, he realised he
>would have to rear monkeys in an environment where to communicate in this
>way was not only safe, but in their interest. Could he encourage them to
>vocalise a primitive language? Would they use it to communicate not only
>with other monkeys, but even with him?
>
>The experiment has excited his peers and won Iriki the Golden Brain Award,
>presented annually for brain research by the Minerva Foundation in the US.
>"This is a guy who is on to a really exciting research programme," says
>neuroscientist Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California.
>Monkeys in the wild produce a limited range of calls - alarm calls to warn
>of approaching predators, for instance. But, says Arbib, "the general
>consensus would be that the set of calls is pretty much innate. Iriki now
>seems to show that the call system may be much more flexible than we thought".
>
>Iriki has a reputation for lateral thinking. Trained as a dental surgeon,
>he became interested in pain and by that route came to study the brain.
>Several years ago, he showed that a macaque trained to use a rake to grab
>a piece of fruit could operate just as skillfully whether it could see its
>own hand, or was prevented from seeing it and shown instead a video image
>of the hand, rake and fruit reward.
>
>Based on those findings, Iriki argued that monkeys had a concept of body
>image that matched a nine-year-old child. The findings seemed to
>demonstrate a level of abstract thinking that nobody had suspected in
>monkeys - though researchers had long argued for it in chimps, orang utans
>and gorillas. And they created a dilemma for Iriki.
>
>The problem was this: if monkeys have a relatively advanced view of
>themselves, how is it that they appear to be so oblivious to the behaviour
>of others, unable to follow the gaze of another monkey or imitate
>gestures, as even human toddlers can do? It mattered to Iriki because
>imitation and joint attention are considered key building blocks of the
>kind of shared understanding that makes communication possible. In the
>wild, monkeys rarely imitate. But two pieces of evidence suggested to
>Iriki that they could learn to - and they hinge on a recently discovered
>type of brain cell called a "mirror neuron".
>
>Animal behaviour experts have very occasionally observed both imitation
>and joint attention - which lets one follow another's gaze - between
>mother and infant macaques in the wild. And, though macaques seem to show
>no interest in others' actions, activity in their brains suggests they do.
>It harbours a type of neuron that fires not only when it performs an
>action, but also when it sees another monkey perform the same action.
>
>These mirror neurons were first identified by Giacomo Rizzolatti of the
>University of Parma, Italy, and colleagues in the early 1990s in an area
>of the macaque brain called the premotor cortex, and specifically in a
>sub-section called F5. Subsequently they have turned up in other areas.
>Luciano Fadiga at the University of Ferrara then found evidence that the
>human brain contained a mirror system of its own.
>
>When Rizzolatti's group investigated the human brain more closely, using
>functional magnetic resonance imaging, they showed that, among other
>places, mirror neurons show up in Broca's area, which in the human brain
>is responsible for speech production. F5 in monkeys is associated mainly
>with hand movements, but is the anatomical equivalent of Broca's area.
>
>There followed frenzied speculation about the role of mirror neurons.
>Rizzolatti and Arbib claimed that by providing the platform for imitation
>and shared understanding, they made language possible. Nevertheless, the
>question remained for Iriki: if humans and monkeys have mirror neurons,
>why are humans natural mimics while monkeys hardly ever imitate?
>
>"Maybe monkey brains are unaware of the mirror neurons' potential," he
>says. "When their brains realised the possible uses of this system,
>perhaps due to the expression of a gene trig gered by some accidental
>incident in the course of evolution, that could have been the beginning of
>the explosion of intelligent functions."
>
>Iriki suspects that a likely trigger for that realisation was human
>child-rearing practices. Using eye contact, mothers teach their babies to
>look in the same direction and to copy their actions. So in Iriki's lab,
>monkeys are reared as closely as possible to humans, with an intense
>relationship between the young monkey and its human carer.
>
>In a study published last year, his group showed that three in four
>monkeys brought up in this way learned joint attention, and once they had
>learned it, began to imitate a human's actions without having to be taught.
>
>Iriki is not the only scientist to experiment in this area. At Georgia
>State University, Atlanta, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has taught a
>human-reared pygmy chimp to become adept at communicating with symbols.
>But the difference is that Iriki's macaques choose their own calls to
>express what they want. When he trained two macaques to use a rake to
>retrieve a fruit reward, and then to call for either food or the tool, he
>found the monkeys produced different cooing noises depending on what they
>wanted. "I think this is the evolutionary precursor of naming," he says.
>
>Psychologist Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St Andrews says that
>what Iriki reports is new: monkeys are not known to produce acoustically
>distinct sounds associated with novel events or objects - certainly not
>with a man-made tool.
>
>Zuberbühler studies Campbell's and Diana monkeys in West Africa, whose
>calls are innate. "The acoustic structures of the different predator calls
>vary from one monkey species to the next, but those species are still able
>to understand each other," he says.
>
>By contrast, Iriki's monkeys' new calls do not yet have much communicative
>power. Each monkey has a different call for a given object, and the sounds
>are not the same. Iriki thinks it might be possible to teach naive monkeys
>to imitate the calls of others, and in so doing, help them learn what they
>mean. They might then use the calls themselves, to express the same idea.
>He can envisage, say, a macaque calling to another macaque for a tool,
>which is then dutifully handed over.
>
>"This is fascinating," says Fadiga, who thinks Iriki's work has the
>potential to reveal the origins of human language. But he also has doubts,
>not least that the monkeys will maintain any primitive language they
>develop. "The question is, do you think the monkeys need this language?
>Because if they do not need it, they will not teach others."
>
>Rizzolatti, meanwhile, is excited by the possibility that monkeys have
>mirror neurons but are unable to use them. "That has some interesting
>implications," he says. "For instance, perhaps autistic children have the
>mirror system but cannot use it. Or perhaps it is there, but not fully
>developed."
>
>One common symptom among autistic children is that they repeat words
>spoken to them without apparently understanding them - a phenomenon known
>as echolalia. At the same time, their language development is delayed,
>suggesting their mirror system may be malfunctioning. Rizzolatti
>speculates one could use tricks similar to Iriki's to improve the system's
>functioning in those kids.
>
>Iriki does not think it too far-fetched to suggest that humans could one
>day tune into his monkeys' enriched repertoire of sounds, using it to
>converse with them at a simple level. Then there will be a debate as to
>whether it deserves to be called language.
>
>"I think it's going to remain the case that language as we know it in
>humans is different from language that even the best brought-up ape is
>going to get to," says Arbib.
>
>But Iriki is already thinking laterally again. If monkey brains have
>redundant capacity, why not human brains? "Human language and intelligence
>could be brought up to a much higher level than we are at now," he says.
>
>"We are still in the middle of evolution. We can dream of the future."
>
>Further reading:
>
>www.brain.riken.go.jp/english/ Atsushi Iriki at the Laboratory for
>Symbolic Cognitive Development, Riken, Saitama, Japan
>
>Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language by Maxim Stamenov
>and Vittorio Gallese, 2002 paperback (John Benjamins, Amsterdam). ISBN
>1588112152
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