scholarly journals Call Usage Learning by a Beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) in a Categorical Matching Task

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeria Vergara ◽  
Lance Barrett-Lennard
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Learning ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Delphinapterus Leucas ◽  
Random Sequences ◽  
Pulse Trains ◽  
The Social ◽  
Vocalization Type ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Call Usage

The ability to modify the structure and context of vocalizations through learning plays a key role in the social interactions of many species. The investigation of categorical matching, an aspect of contextual vocal learning, is the first step toward determining how contextual learning plays a role in the use, comprehension, and categorization of sounds in the wild. To this end, we conducted a study at the Vancouver Aquarium to test the ability of a juvenile female beluga, Qila, to respond to playbacks of two types of in-air beluga calls with vocalizations that matched the category of call played (a scream, which is a vocalization type shaped over time with reinforcement and not part of this species'natural repertoire, and a pulse-train, a natural call category). We first tested Qila with random sequences of the same version of the two vocalizations with which she had been trained. Her overall success in matching all playback stimuli was above chance but not statistically so (66%). She had more difficulty matching screams (54% success) than pulse trains (80% success). We next played random sequences of six novel pulse-trains and seven novel screams, which Qila had not been trained with. She responded correctly to the set of novel stimuli of both call types in 64% of the trials, a success rate that did not differ statistically from chance. Again, she had more difficulty matching screams (55% success), relative to pulse trains (74% success). These results indicate that Qila successfully matched only pulse trains, the class that is part of this species’ natural repertoire. Her poor performance on matching screams might be partly explained by a difficulty to perceive categorically a signal that lacks a function in the natural repertoire of belugas.

scholarly journals ASSIMILATING AND REPRODUCING CONCEPTS AFTER PHARMACOLOGY LECTURE - A QUESTIONNAIRE-BASED STUDY

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-125
Author(s):  
SYAM SREEDHARAN ◽  
DHANYA SASIDHARAN PALAPPALLIL ◽  
LAILA KANDATH VEEDU ◽  
HARI SANKAR KN ◽  
ATHIRA MUTHANATTU DIVAKARAN
Keyword(s):  
Poor Performance ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Simple Explanation ◽  
Medical College ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medical Undergraduates ◽  
Simple Language ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spss Software ◽  
Short Answer Questions

Objective: Medical undergraduates learn pharmacology during the second phase of MBBS. Considering the expanding list of drugs and volatility associated with its learning, the objective of this study was to describe the factors that interfere with the assimilation and reproduction of the concepts in pharmacology. Methods: This was a descriptive study done in the Department of Pharmacology of a Government Medical College in Central Kerala for a period of 2 months. Five short answer questions were chosen to elicit responses from the participants in the form of a surprise test. A Google fill out form elicited the perception of the participants about learning during the pharmacology lecture. The data were sorted and entered into Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 16 (SPSS Inc, Chicago, USA). Descriptive data were expressed using frequencies and percentages. Results: Of the 148 students, 84 (56.75%) participated in the study. For the surprise test, the mean marks scored were 2.24±0.77 (maximum marks 5). Forty-seven (56%) participants claimed that they were attentive in pharmacology lectures only “sometimes.” The majority of the participants 82 (97.6%) “sometimes” found it difficult to imbibe the concepts in pharmacology. Seventy (83.3%) agreed that definitions are difficult to learn as such. Only 10 (11.9%) disagreed with the statement that a drug’s action cannot be interpreted as its use because sometimes actions can aggravate some diseases. Sixty-one (72.6%) participants had difficulty in understanding the word “rationale.” Five minutes break, continuity of topics, separate question-answer session at the end of class, summarization, a video demonstration of the mechanism of action, providing printed lecture notes, simple explanation, mnemonics to learn, clinical correlation, lectures during morning hours, and team-based quizzes were some suggestions to increase the assimilation of the subject. Conclusion: Participants had a mean score which was <50% of the total score. While the scores for definitions varied the question on uses of drugs fetched similar marks; however, the students had poor performance on the question related to rationale. Ignorance about the meaning of the word “rationale” shows the importance of regular feedback and the use of simple language in understanding the problems faced by the participants in learning the concepts in pharmacology.

scholarly journals Cognitive Abilities in the Wild: Population-scale game-based cognitive assessment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads Kock Pedersen ◽  
Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz ◽  
Mario Alejandro Alba-Marrugo ◽  
Ali Amidi ◽  
Rajiv Vaid Basaiwmoit ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Wild Population ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Large Population ◽  
Population Sample ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Large Population Sample ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
Unique Dataset

Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments fail to capture the full range of differences in cognitive abilities and behaviours across the general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and employed in practical, clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based approach allowing the efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities. Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced population-size sample recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of cognitive abilities with age in a large population sample. Furthermore, by combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk preference being independent of executive functioning.

The Ecology of Social Learning in Animals and its Link with Intelligence

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carel van Schaik ◽  
Sereina Graber ◽  
Caroline Schuppli ◽  
Judith Burkart
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Skill Acquisition ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Cultural Intelligence ◽  
Learning Ability ◽  
Learning Abilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Broad Variety

AbstractClassical ethology and behavioral ecology did not pay much attention to learning. However, studies of social learning in nature reviewed here reveal the near-ubiquity of reliance on social information for skill acquisition by developing birds and mammals. This conclusion strengthens the plausibility of the cultural intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of intelligence, which assumes that selection on social learning abilities automatically improves individual learning ability. Thus, intelligent species will generally be cultural species. Direct tests of the cultural intelligence hypothesis require good estimates of the amount and kind of social learning taking place in nature in a broad variety of species. These estimates are lacking so far. Here, we start the process of developing a functional classification of social learning, in the form of the social learning spectrum, which should help to predict the mechanisms of social learning involved. Once validated, the categories can be used to estimate the cognitive demands of social learning in the wild.

Controlling for Pongoland

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-193
Author(s):  
Nicolas Langlitz
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Comparative Psychology ◽  
Kindergarten Children ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Cultural Primatology ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter investigates how Christophe Boesch's colleague and codirector Michael Tomasello derived truth claims about the anthropological difference between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes from controlled experiments comparing the social cognition of human children with that of grown chimpanzees. Tomasello's claim that humans were the only primates capable of culture and cooperation received an enthusiastic reception by German philosophers. Yet Boesch called into question the validity of Tomasello's findings by pointing out that the social behavior of both humans and apes was too contingent on local circumstances for Leipzig kindergarten children and zoo chimpanzees rescued from a Dutch pharmaceutical company to represent all of humanity and chimpanzeehood. He accused Tomasello of not controlling for the different conditions under which Tomasello tested humans and apes. The ensuing controversy over the relationship between laboratory work and fieldwork happened at a time when new statistical methods were opening up vast new possibilities for chimpanzee ethnography, even fostering hopes that experimentation with captive animals would become superfluous because uncontrolled observations in the wild would allow the establishment of causal relations. The chapter then assesses whether Boesch's cultural primatology could inform a different philosophical anthropology than the one drawing from Tomasello's comparative psychology.

A Hierarchical Hadoop Framework to Handle Big Data in Geo-Distributed Computing Environments

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orazio Tomarchio ◽  
Giuseppe Di Modica ◽  
Marco Cavallo ◽  
Carmelo Polito
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Data Centers ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computing Environments ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Hadoop Framework

Advances in the communication technologies, along with the birth of new communication paradigms leveraging on the power of the social, has fostered the production of huge amounts of data. Old-fashioned computing paradigms are unfit to handle the dimensions of the data daily produced by the countless, worldwide distributed sources of information. So far, the MapReduce has been able to keep the promise of speeding up the computation over Big Data within a cluster. This article focuses on scenarios of worldwide distributed Big Data. While stigmatizing the poor performance of the Hadoop framework when deployed in such scenarios, it proposes the definition of a Hierarchical Hadoop Framework (H2F) to cope with the issues arising when Big Data are scattered over geographically distant data centers. The article highlights the novelty introduced by the H2F with respect to other hierarchical approaches. Tests run on a software prototype are also reported to show the increase of performance that H2F is able to achieve in geographical scenarios over a plain Hadoop approach.

scholarly journals The social and ecological costs of an ‘over-extended' phenotype

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1822) ◽  
pp. 20152359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon Alexander Jordan ◽  
Sean M. Maguire ◽  
Hans A. Hofmann ◽  
Masanori Kohda
Keyword(s):  
Cichlid Fish ◽  
Experimental Manipulation ◽  
Ecological Interactions ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Extended Phenotype ◽  
Breeding Sites ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Social Policing ◽  
Ecological Cost

Extended phenotypes offer a unique opportunity to experimentally manipulate and identify sources of selection acting on traits under natural conditions. The social cichlid fish Neolamprologus multifasciatus builds nests by digging up aquatic snail shells, creating an extended sexual phenotype that is highly amenable to experimental manipulation through addition of extra shells. Here, we find sources of both positive sexual selection and opposing natural selection acting on this trait; augmenting shell nests increases access to mates, but also increases social aggression and predation risk. Increasing the attractiveness of one male also changed social interactions throughout the social network and altered the entire community structure. Manipulated males produced and received more displays from neighbouring females, who also joined augmented male territories at higher rates than unmanipulated groups. However, males in more attractive territories received more aggression from neighbouring males, potentially as a form of social policing. We also detected a significant ecological cost of the ‘over-extended' phenotype; heterospecific predators usurped augmented nests at higher rates, using them as breeding sites and displacing residents. Using these natural experiments, we find that both social and ecological interactions generate clear sources of selection mediating the expression of an extended phenotype in the wild.

Knowledge Acquisition and Technology-Supported Projects in the Social Studies for Students with Learning Disabilities

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Okolo ◽  
Ralph P. Ferretti
Keyword(s):  
Learning Disabilities ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Students With Disabilities ◽  
Word Processing ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Students With Learning Disabilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Based Instruction

All citizens are expected to participate in the processes of democratic decision making in the postschool years, and the goals of social studies education have long included the preparation of an informed citizenry. However, surveys show that social studies instruction is often not provided for students with disabilities, and those that receive instruction do poorly compared to their nondisabled peers. Students' poor performance is exacerbated by the reliance on “inconsiderate” textbooks that are often poorly organized, lacking in content, and devoid of important background information. Project-based instruction is an alternative to the exclusive reliance on textbook-based instruction in the social studies. Students investigate a problem or question and develop artifacts based on these investigations. In this study, students with learning disabilities, working under two different conditions, developed projects about factors that precipitated the American Revolutionary War. Students in both conditions worked cooperatively to learn about some aspect of the Revolutionary War, and they then contributed to the construction and presentation of a group report about the topic. However, students in one group had access to word processing tools, and the other had access to word processing and multimedia presentation tools in developing their projects. Analyses of students' knowledge revealed a substantial improvement in both conditions after the completion of the projects.

The Spread of Non-Natural Concepts

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Lisdorf
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Basic Assumption ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Real Effect ◽  
Specific Distribution ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Counterintuitive Concepts ◽  
Better Than

AbstractPascal Boyer, Justin Barret and associates have recently developed precise and testable hypotheses about what makes a concept attention-demanding, easier to recall and therefore has increased probability of being transmitted. Two theses are tested: 1) that all else being equal counterintuitive concepts are better remembered than bizarre, and bizarre better than common; 2) that counterintuitive concepts containing certain templates, which involve the activation of theory of mind expectations should have greater success. The research so far has been in controlled experiments, but it should be possible to test the theses "in the wild". The evidence from the roman prodigy reports offers us such a possibility. It also enables us to check for variation across time, which hasn't been done before. Thesis 1) is confirmed, but not thesis 2). It is argued however that this is not a disconfirmation of Boyer's general thesis. By considering the context it is argued that it does not disconfirm the basic assumption of the theory. The evidence could suggest that when the "social inferential potential" of templates activating TOM expectations is not used it has no transmission advantage. It is also argued that the specific distribution shows that what is normally considered local cultural factors, have a real effect on what is transmitted.

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