Monkey see, monkey read

Guinea baboon learned to recognize words from nonwords exhibiting human-like orthographic processing. More about our work on word recognition (iPhone app): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scienc...

Video en français: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwEjDlJ03IU

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Reip187]

Just read about this on Science Daily. What was the inspiration for this study? What basis did you have for the hypothesis in the first place? Th e article I read didn't give any background as to what brought you to testing baboons in the first place really. Always find it interesting to know how researchers even contemplated the hypothesis.

Man...they are quick on the draw too for recognizing these words/non-words.

[Stephane Dufau]

We work on the the way readers (beginners and skilled) process words. In humans, the visual perception of a word is followed by the activation of its sound and the meaning. The key idea behind working with monkeys is to study the visual perception of a word in a kind of a language vacuum. Is the way humans read words driven by a linguistic skill? Maybe monkeys are "blind" facing written words?

[sth128]

And now we just need to inject them with brain-enhancing drugs and we can have a real live version of Planet of the Apes.

[Stephane Dufau]

It is purely behavioral here. Good baboon observation, and computers to display the words and collect the accuracy of the responses.

[MrBatata]

And does it mean that it's possible to actually teach them read? Do you think it's possible to teach to connect between words and meaning (e.g they are shown the word "dog" and then afterwards a picture of a dog is shown(or even a video))? If they can learn to create mental representations of a word in their head, maybe they will be able to connect different words together as well, which can be a primitive way of reading (e.g "Dog eat food")

[Stephane Dufau]

I talked to Sabrina today, a student in our lab, who told me that Alex the parrot is doing quite well making such associations (videos on YouTube). One way of continuing on the newly created "baboon linguistic" would be to try to teach them how to associate a word form and a meaning, or a sound. You are perfectly right. But, maybe there is a limit in what we can teach them - it must be since we are two different species with two different kind of abilities - or maybe not...

[Stephane Dufau]

baboons do associate the structure of a word to a response (leading to a reward or not), just like humans link a word to a particular meaning. The question is how they do that. Baboons' mistakes showed that they were reading by letters - just like us - using the internal structure of a word.

[pistolpeetlokk]

they read like us and learn like us , but why cant they sound out the words like us ? thats what i wanna know

[griffinej5]

I'm fairly certain Alex the parrot died a few years ago, so he's not learning anything. Do you have any thoughts about doing research in stimulus equivalence with the baboons? It would be interesting to see if the development of equivalence classes would occur.

[Reip187]

The first thing I thought of while looking at this was: "how does a deaf child learn to read?". Obviously, they wouldn't be learning without other stimuli like pictures, lip reading, etc. I understand this is a very base study to find some root causes into how someone can, or really does read. Trying to break it into the most basic concepts to see how this develops. Do you keep going from here and expand with these particular baboons, or do you continue to test these concepts on new baboons?

[alwzcok]

20000 views \o/

[much0J]

Incredible study, this is the kind of thing I would support. Question is, what will monkey think, say or write?

[Stephane Dufau]

we didn't test that since our words were presented one by one. But given the literature on animal cognition, I would be inclined to say yes - there is so much to test.

[Stephane Dufau]

Just forgot. The Planet of the Apes is based on a novel written by Pierre Boulle, born in Avignon (France), few dozens of km from the place where our baboons are.