A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes

https://neurosciencenews.com/sequential-memory-human-trait-23888/

by gardenfelder • 3 years ago

41 74 3 years ago

neurosciencenews.com

gardenfelder• 3 years ago

The paper

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

comboy• 3 years ago

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.

dang• 3 years ago

Perhaps we'll get a better thread if we use that title above.

golemotron4• 3 years ago

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

For a while, we thought it was language and then discovered that it wasn't. Same for tool use.

Maybe the search for uniquely human things is the uniquely human thing?

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

yyyk5• 3 years ago

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.

golemotron4• 3 years ago

Have we really taken over the planet or is it just that it looks like that from our perspective?

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-ants-live-e...

(answer: 20 quadrillion)

konschubert5• 3 years ago

It may be a difference in quantity rather than a categorical difference. If humans are 10x better at X than animals, it doesn't mean that X is unique to humans. But the things that humans can achieve by using X will obviously very different from what animals can achieve.

Wolfbeta• 3 years ago

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.

bad_alloc• 3 years ago

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

golemotron4• 3 years ago

We should just wonder why these distinctions are so important to us.

syndicatedjelly3• 3 years ago

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

Gys• 3 years ago

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 ;)

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

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.

FridayNightTV• 3 years ago

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.

svnt5• 3 years ago

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

Maybe you just missed it, or scared them off.

drug use and fire: https://youtu.be/qgtXTv0jGxg https://youtu.be/kU95P7kilLU
limited intellect https://youtu.be/DJsn1QivbKM https://youtu.be/Gui3IswQ0DI
social bonding https://youtu.be/i497TV5Q6TY https://youtu.be/MI75eogv6Wo

dboreham• 3 years ago

Tool use. When the tools are purchased from Harbor Freight.

gizmo6862• 3 years ago

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.

DougMerritt• 3 years ago

I think it's at the level where one has to say only humans have non-trivial fully recursive grammar -- word order has to matter. Various animals have been shown to have fairly impressive language abilities otherwise.

A long time ago one didn't have to phrase it carefully.

xk_id4• 3 years ago

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.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

Fascinating trigger, thats not what they said

Searching for the mental capacity is the weird thing, there’s more pointing to the idea that other species cant be compelled to care. We cant even tell if another human is capable of intelligence if they are handicapped in speech, paralyzed or locked in. Our best brain scans dont correlate with the level of consciousness and intelligence told by people that became unlocked after a brain injury. of course there are going to be limitations in animals without vocal cords and other priorities.

orbital-decay2• 3 years ago

Would you say the same about the early homo sapiens? Practically the same mental capabilities but zero accumulated knowledge baggage you have now. Even the articulated form of the "concept of a concept" you mention is a construct humans came to collectively, let alone "financial markets".

The actual mental capability gap between humans and other animals might be shorter than it appears, if you filter out the knowledge obtained over generations (i.e. not possible to obtain individually without some advanced society).

konschubert5• 3 years ago

There are probably very significant quantitative differences. But I don't think there is reason to assume that there is a qualitative difference.

That being said, a sufficiently big quantitative difference is in practice indistinguishable from a qualitative one.

k__• 3 years ago

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.

dbmikus2• 3 years ago

Crows can solve puzzles that require a sequential series of steps. Would that imply they have sequential memory? I saw someone in the article comments mentioning this as well.

cma• 3 years ago

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

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

SanderNL• 3 years ago

How would they survive without?

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

dbmikus2• 3 years ago

I very far from the field of biology, but from the article it means " ability to recognize and recall sequential data".

For crows, I was using it to mean that a crow knows it needs to get tool A so it can get tool B to then use tool B to get the treat.

bedobi• 3 years ago

what? chimps destroy humans at remembering sequences of numbers

syndicatedjelly3• 3 years ago

Tostino2• 3 years ago

Well I've been thoroughly convinced by this argument.

jasonhong• 3 years ago

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

svnt5• 3 years ago

In that video the chimp beats one human who thought he was smart but appears particularly bad at that test.

They are different tests, though. You don’t need sequential memory to win that test, you just need near photographic recall and the general knowledge of numerical order.

kanzenryu2• 3 years ago

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

pazimzadeh• 3 years ago

Someone once told me that humans are basically juvenile chimps

mycologos• 3 years ago

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

svnt5• 3 years ago

The authors of the paper seem to argue that this is distinct for memorizing information that is initially presented sequentially.

It is: think about how you would naively work an n-back of randomly ordered symbols. Most people can’t do more than a few n-back.

However if I have photographic recall I can count forwards or backwards trivially. These are very different mental processes.

behnamoh2• 3 years ago

It’s unique to humans until it isn’t (LLMs).

chrisco2553• 3 years ago

LLMs are a human technology.

behnamoh2• 3 years ago

doesn’t matter. that’s orthogonal to this discussion.

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

I had a bad experience very recently with hash (in the non-CS sense.) There was a harm done, for a couple of hours, to my understanding of time, of recalling "when" each memory I was using was formed. I could not tell AT ALL if it was from literally 10 seconds ago, or weeks/months ago. It was incapacitating, but upon reflection, really showed as is often the case with medical science and pathology, there was a faculty at play here that was only apparent when removed. I could not function without the ability to sequence events, including the provenence of each damn propositions I was trying to use to explain my current existence. Bad times. But with some distance quite interesting.

nerdponx• 3 years ago

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.

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

I'm describing something I thought was salient. This was a passage of time issue, but it was specifically the loss of the ability to temporaily sequence the provenance of recollection. Imagine having a discussion where you couldn't tell if you said something in the previous sentence, or last week. We (apparently) feel this information and use it to guide the process. There was clearly some sort of 'tagging' of memory regarding it's age and how it "should" be used in reasoning, and I lost that. TFA is talking about this sequence being unique to humans.

I felt like I was 102 years old. I wonder how other organisms function without relying upon this appently inate ability.

A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes

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