
Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages - polm23
https://corvidresearch.blog/2020/06/21/the-crows-are-watching-your-language-literally/
======
ianai
Between the zoonotic origins of covid (and just epidemiology generally) and
the book “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are” by Franz de Waal
I’m really resetting my understanding of life. Animals are just way way
smarter than we give them credit for - not the least because of eons of
telling ourselves we’re the living beings and they’re the automatons
(seriously, go read how Descartes wrote about them). We’re also clearly made
of largely similar systems and “parts” since bugs are capable of going between
different organisms. Like getting viruses from bats or pangolins or chickens
or ferrets to humans. The “software” and “hardware” must all be similar enough
for us to a little more humility.

~~~
Hokusai
I have to disagree. I see the opposite problem. We think too highly of human
intelligence, we should be more humble.

Our most important source of intelligence is culture. We copy what we see
others doing and that make us think that we are smart. It's the equivalent to
see a Mathematical proof and think that we could also have done it.

Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose
weight or study an uninteresting topic.

It took humanity one hundred thousand years to realize that writing symbols
allowed for a good communication system. And we did that by copy and error, a
kind of evolutive process. Nobody sit down for hours until they invented
writing.

So, you see the glass half full, I see it half empty, I guess.

But there is usefulness in seeing the glass half empty. As, it makes us more
aware of our lakings and biases.

This opinion, I formed by reading many other opinions adding one more step on
the evolution of knowledge (maybe I'm wrong and it's just a dead end thou)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. That is why it's so hard to lose
> weight

Obesity is largely a function of culture.

~~~
Hokusai
> Obesity is largely a function of culture.

It relates to sugary and fatty food availability. So, yes it's cultural and
can be improved by improved the system.

But, its root is the incapability of human beings on avoiding the 'temptation'
of unhealthy food.

Asking people to stop eating too much and too bad does not work because our
survival instincts tell us that to not eat when you can is stupid. So, changes
in availability of unhealthy food are needed to improve the population health.

Your point does not invalidate my point, but both describe our society.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Sure, and I didn't mean to come across as obtuse, my point was that it's hard
to find truly culture-insensitive aspects of the human experience.

Even the basics like our tastes in food, and what traits we find physically
attractive, are steered by culture. You're right of course that ultimately
we're wired to enjoy sugar, fat, and salt, in a way that works against our
health when they are available in effectively limitless quantities.

I don't agree with _Most of our behaviour is based on instinct_. We allow
perfect strangers into our homes to fix the plumbing. (Bruce Schneier wrote a
great book about this kind of trust. [0]) A baby can learn to enjoy the
company of a Malamute. Even our instinct to avoid being eaten by wolves, seems
to be negotiable.

> changes in availability of unhealthy food are needed to improve the
> population health.

Agreed.

[0]
[https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/](https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/)

~~~
jon_elbrook
>I don't agree with Most of our behaviour is based on instinct. We allow
perfect strangers into our homes to fix the plumbing.

And we stay in the house to keep watch on them.

>A baby can learn to enjoy the company of a Malamute. Even our instinct to
avoid being eaten by wolves,

You have to first establish that we have an instinct to avoid being eaten by
wolves. And how that would work in humans that don't live where there are
wolves for thousands of years.....

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sdenton4
This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more
interesting to me: [https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-
pa...](https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-part-ii-qa/)

Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-
simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would
fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...

~~~
vmception
There was a movie where the aliens patiently let humans try to devise a way to
teach a way to communicate, but they were teaching the humans a superior way
of communicating the whole time. Would be a spoiler if I said the movie name
and you hadn't seen it.

I wouldn't be surprised if various domestic and cohabiting animals feel that
way about us. A lot of what we do is built around verbal nuance but isn't
really necessary to get the same results in our daily routine, acquiring goods
or hunting, or sex. Analogous to how adult cats do not vocalize to each other
(at least in a frequency we can hear), or a person that is into you doesn't
really care what you say only the tone. Our hierarchy of needs and wants are a
shared protocol already, and it is communicable to other people that don't
speak the same language, other mammals, birds, and cephalopods without
speaking.

~~~
mistermann
Please post the spoiler in a few days, I have no idea but want to watch this.

~~~
poulsbohemian
I think parent poster is referring to Arrival:
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
The book was better :)

~~~
taejo
As somebody who loves both, I recommend watching the movie _before_ reading
the short story; IMO there's something the viewer only gradually understands
in the movie that's explicit up front in the story.

------
seven4
_" As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with
playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese
speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a
completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they
acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other
words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages
without any prior training!"_

I would be interested to hear the respective recordings - is it possible that
something else in the speaker's voice (tone/manner/volume) that they were
responding to?

Edit: Ok so i went looking in the original paper which describes the method
and it looks quite thought out - though i would still love to hear the
recording or see the video footage.
([https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...](https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf))

 _" We used twenty Dutch and twenty Japanese sentences as stimuli. They were
all declarative, adult-directed, approximately 2.5 seconds long, and spoken by
four female native speakers. After the habituation to the aviary on three
consecutive days, the crows were tested for their responses to the Dutch and
Japanese stimuli in a total of eight trials which were distributed over four
days (i.e., two trials per day). Four crows received Dutch stimuli for the
first four trials and Japanese stimuli for the last four trials, while the
other three crows were assigned the opposite language order. Before the start
of each trial, the crows were given 3–5 min for familiarization to the
surroundings. Each trial consisted of four blocks of stimulus presentation
with inter-block intervals of a 1–2-min silent period. Within each block, a
set of ten sentences spoken by two different speakers was continuously
presented twice in a random order. A 30 min silent period was inserted between
the trials each day. The trial schedule including stimulus presentation was
controlled by the programme PsychoPy 3 (Peirce, 2007). The sound level was set
at a range between 70 and 80 dB across the perches. According to the different
behavioural responses to 1,000 Hz and 1,600 Hz tone......"_

~~~
polm23
For reference, this testing process is similar to a standard one used with
human infants. This paper isn't one cited by the crow paper, it's just one I'm
familiar with that uses a similar process; it may be connected to the crow
paper through a citation chain, as some of their cites also deal with human
infants.

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/274/5294/1926)

------
zwieback
I read "Hollow Kingdom" a little while back, pretty good novel about how a
crow that learned human language saves the world from a zombie invasion.

~~~
abhgh
That sounded like such an unusual theme I had to go read up reviews :)

------
fuzzfactor
A few years ago a lost dog came to our small laboratory parking lot from the
nearby neighborhood.

Not a real stray just a misplaced house dog, but it was more fearful than
most. When somebody went out there and talked to it the dog hid underneath a
parked car and would not come out.

A few more people tried even bringing snacks but doggie wouldn't budge.

After about ten more minutes another worker goes out there, looks under the
car and talks to the dog in spanish, and the dog comes out wagging its tail.

We do have many languages natively spoken by our people and up until that
point none had come close to a spanish accent.

And then there's this:

basically a near-transcript of a Paul Harvey broadcast from the old ABC Radio

[https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-
elephant](https://bible.org/illustration/bozo-elephant)

------
m0zg
Could be that they are simply responding to different ways of pronouncing
vowels? This is something most ESL speakers have problems with, for example.
I.e. the "o" sound in "love" is somewhere between the Russian "o" and "a", and
"a" sound in "land" is somewhere between the Russian "a" and "э". English
speakers are attuned to such minute differences. Russian speakers are not,
which is why if you ask them to pronounce the word "fax", they'll pronounce it
as "fucks". :-)

~~~
082349872349872
Coq is a francophone's revenge (deniable in more than one way) for the bit.

------
Markoff
this reminds me racist dogs in Goa (India)

been staying on beach, dogs very friendly towards me (your Aryan white),
forming even circle around me when I sat down on beach in early morning, but
God forbid (dark) looking local tried to go on beach, they scared him away. I
noticed this actually in some other tourist places as well, dogs being
friendly to tourists while aggressive with locals

but if it makes anyone feel happy, dogs in Agra don't indiscriminate, I've
seen them attacking badly local children same as they attacked me when going
in morning to Taj Mahal, only place in India with aggressive dogs (towards me)
I experienced

~~~
klohto
How can a dog be racist? It has no prejudice and acts solely on previous
experience.

~~~
barrkel
Incorrect or unfair generalization from previous experience is prejudice.

Pre-judging a novel scenario from biased information or processes is a
functional definition of prejudice.

~~~
qw
I knew a dog (German Shepard) that was scared by another dog of a different
breed (flat coated retriever) when she was young. The rest of her life she was
really careful around dogs of the attacker's colour, and aggressive against
dogs of the breed as the "bad" dog. If a dog was both the same colour and
breed you had to hold the leash tight...

I guess the dogs in Goa have similar experiences. They mostly associate
tourists with giving them food and other positive experiences, but have maybe
bad experiences from a few locals that have chased them away from their
property etc. The individuals in the pack may not even have experienced
anything bad, but have learned from the behaviour of other dogs that they
should be careful

~~~
nineparts
And how many "few locals" is enough for prejudice to turn into statistic?

~~~
qw
For a dog, one bad experience can be enough. They can also spread their
behaviour to other dogs that notice that they are afraid in certain
situations. These dogs will "teach" other dogs and the behaviour spreads
quickly.

~~~
yareally
Yep, animals learn from bad experiences quite fast. My little parrot won't go
near towels anymore because we used to wrap him in one so he would hold still
while trimming his nails. This doesn't hurt the bird and not doing it makes it
hard for them to walk, but the sounds and struggle emmited by that pint sized
green cheeked conure would make the unaware think I was torturing him.

Now, he won't even let us wrap him in a towel after he decides to dunk himself
in his water bowl for a bath. No matter how wet, cold and pathetic he looks
(birds smell like a wet potato after a bath), he won't let us dry him off.

~~~
Markoff
how do they trim them in wild?

~~~
yareally
The other commenter sums it up--they have many more coarse/rough items to
cling onto in the wild. We leave plenty of items like that in his cage as
well, but he's very particular about where he perches and what he perches on.
Parrots can be very set in their ways and takes a lot of work at times to
introduce them to new things in their routine.

Also have to keep their beak grounded down for similar reasons. It's quite
sharp and he's learned he can use it as a weapon when he's not getting his
way. Imagine a 2 year old human that isn't afraid to poke you with a sharp
stick when they don't get their metaphorical candy. That's pretty much my
parrot.

It's kind of like sharing a space with the world's biggest (and
smallest/cutest) curmudgeon at times (parrots are cranky when they don't get
enough sleep). He loves me and my SO, though he loves her more than me, even
though he's technically my parrot. Parrots are kind of like us in that they
pick and choose who they love and make you work for it.

I can say having a parrot as a pet is a drastically different experience than
I've had with cats, dogs or rodents.

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greeneggs
Looking at the results, there doesn't seem to be a large difference between
the two languages. And it is a very small sample size. I am not sure how to
interpret it.

Here is a link to the paper:
[https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10](https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10)

> Language discrimination has previously been found in human infants, cotton-
> top tamarin monkeys, rats, and java sparrows. This ability might also be
> relevant for the crow, a social passerine with extensive auditory perceptual
> skills living in close contact with humans…

------
acqq
The Onion's take on crows research:

[https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-
enough...](https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough-not-
to-let-on-how-s-1844081510)

"Researchers Find Crows Smart Enough Not To Let On How Smart They Really Are"

~~~
tsco77
I do believe that article should be about lab rats.

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wespiser_2018
If crows are so smart, then why do they eat our garbage?

~~~
cycomanic
Not sure if you're being sarcastic.

I guess the better question would be, if we are smart why are we throwing away
so much useful stuff?

~~~
wespiser_2018
Yea, it's a joke. I guess it doesn't come across well, but if you say it in
person while people are talking about crows, people will usually laugh :)

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monadic2
Link to PDF:
[https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...](https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_paper_10.pdf)

