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Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- satisfice 2mo agoOnce again, Dr. Dolittle’s seminal work is ignored.
- ileonichwiesz 2mo agoVery interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead: Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/scientists-win-us100-000-in-2026-coller-dolittle-prize https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre... The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482
- MathMonkeyMan 2mo agoIt does have the title going for it.
- technothrasher 2mo agoThe 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.
- t-writescode 2mo agoI’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.
- adjejmxbdjdn 2mo agoI don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking. Other than that you’re right.
- why_at 2mo agoYeah 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.
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- SapporoChris 2mo agoWhat the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.
- t-writescode 2mo agoSome variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling": Plants scream when harmed: [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-loud-we-just-never-heard-it-until-now https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou... [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-cry-and-some-animals-can-probably-hear-them/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c... Plants release VOCs when harmed: [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/when_a_plant_is_attacked_by_herbivores_it_can/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/... (OP's main comment has several sources) Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta): [3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&segmentID=4 https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s... [4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/ A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
- kiproping 2mo agoThank you, I was also looking for a better source and a link to the paper. I thought the paper was this older one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9 from 2018.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoHere's a non-paywalled version of the research. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....
- AndrewKemendo 2mo agoAnother win for machine learning: >She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.
- bluechair 2mo agoI 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.
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoNo doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2mo agoI started feeding a local murder of crows earlier this year. They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?” They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing. I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.
- ghurtado 2mo agoA 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.”
- Exoristos 2mo agoYes, it rather begs the omniscience of the researchers, doesn't it?
- esafak 2mo agoDoes anyone have a link to a decoded message?
- pks016 2mo agoI 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.
- computerdork 2mo agoInteresting! Could you break this down further? Maybe specific examples of what you're mentioning might help - for instance, what "similar-sounding calls with different functions" are zebra finches discriminating between? What exactly are different situations of these functions? How exactly (and through what experiments) did she determine this? And I read the article (but not her research paper), and have a vague idea, but it's tough to get a full grasp - and if this is just too difficult to fully explain, no worries!
- pks016 2mo agoYeah, the paper is indeed difficult to read (even for me). I read it a while back. I'll try to explain. So, there are few things to know before and see what we're trying to prove. main thing: Categorical perception: (in short) brain perceive similar sounding sounds (say A and B) in a continuous manner, and in the continuum of two sound, there would be a point where one sound (A) will switch and sound like the other sound (B). In zebra finches, let's take an example: distance call and tet call. Both these calls are contact calls, birds use them to keep in contact with other birds. Now, we need to extract the acoustic similarity between these two calls, and test birds in a experiment where we ask them to discriminate between these two call types (and get a learning curve; say trials vs probability of correct choice). Then, we can fit a theoretical model of categorical perception to see how well they fit both in acoustic and perceptual dimensions. This is for one function (contact call), we can do this within other call types and between other call types. At the end, we can see how much of birds' performance is explained by acoustic dissimilarity, function of acoustic calls etc. This is what the authors have done. They first performed LDA based classification on call type to obtain distance between call types, misclassification etc. (acoustic dimension). Birds went through a series of discrimination experiments based on call types (similar to what wrote above). Then, they compared/matched acoustic and perceptual dimension.