Chimpanzees process structural isomorphisms across sensory modalities

Autor: Andrea Ravignani, Ruth Sonnweber
Přispěvatelé: Informatics and Applied Informatics
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Male
Auditory perception
Linguistics and Language
Pan troglodytes
Brief Article
Touchscreen
Matching (graph theory)
Cognitive Neuroscience
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Sensory system
Choice Behavior
050105 experimental psychology
Language and Linguistics
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Stimulus modality
Cross-modal
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Animals
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Process (anatomy)
ComputingMethodologies_COMPUTERGRAPHICS
Abstraction (linguistics)
Communication
Modalities
business.industry
matching
05 social sciences
Audio-visual
Pattern recognition
analogy
Acoustic Stimulation
Pattern Recognition
Visual
Auditory Perception
Female
Isomorphism
Artificial intelligence
Pattern perception
Psychology
business
Photic Stimulation
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Zdroj: Cognition
ISSN: 0010-0277
Popis: Graphical abstract
Highlights • Chimpanzees had learnt to choose structurally symmetric patterns on a touchscreen. • Playback of asymmetric sounds increased latency to choose symmetric visual patterns. • Chimpanzees form cross-modal isomorphisms between visual and acoustic structures. • Untrained skills for structural analogies can arise spontaneously in nonhuman animals.
Evolution has shaped animal brains to detect sensory regularities in environmental stimuli. In addition, many species map one-dimensional quantities across sensory modalities, such as conspecific faces to voices, or high-pitched sounds to bright light. If basic patterns like repetitions and identities are frequently perceived in different sensory modalities, it could be advantageous to detect cross-modal isomorphisms, i.e. develop modality-independent representations of structural features, exploitable in visual, tactile, and auditory processing. While cross-modal mappings are common in the animal kingdom, the ability to map similar (isomorphic) structures across domains has been demonstrated in humans but no other animals. We tested cross-modal isomorphisms in two chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Individuals were previously trained to choose structurally ‘symmetric’ image sequences (two identical geometrical shapes separated by a different shape) presented beside ‘edge’ sequences (two identical shapes preceded or followed by a different one). Here, with no additional training, the choice between symmetric and edge visual sequences was preceded by playback of three concatenated sounds, which could be symmetric (mimicking the symmetric structure of reinforced images) or edge. The chimpanzees spontaneously detected a visual-auditory isomorphism. Response latencies in choosing symmetric sequences were shorter when presented with (structurally isomorphic) symmetric, rather than edge, sound triplets: The auditory stimuli interfered, based on their structural properties, with processing of the learnt visual rule. Crucially, the animals had neither been exposed to the acoustic sequences before the experiment, nor were they trained to associate sounds to images. Our result provides the first evidence of structure processing across modalities in a non-human species. It suggests that basic cross-modal abstraction capacities transcend linguistic abilities and might involve evolutionary ancient neural mechanisms.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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