I work in the field. The main takeaway is zebra finches (maybe other songbirds) can discriminate vocalizations based on function, even if they sound similar.
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
All humans are human.
Babies can feel pain.
Plants feel.
Animals think.
Just …
So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.
I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.
Left this comment as another computer science connection.
A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...
The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
Other than that you’re right.
Left this comment as another computer science connection.
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.