Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010

Theme of the Summer Institute: The Origins of Language

Participating disciplines:

• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Computer Sciences
• Linguistics
• Neurosciences
• Paleontology
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Zoology

Dates: June 21^st to 30^th 2010

Language: Due to its international character, the Summer Institute will be held entirely in English.

The Institute is intended for:

• graduate and post-graduate students from the participating disciplines,
• faculty members, scholars, engineers, and professionals from these disciplines.

2009 Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science

2009 Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science

September 2, 2009 – September 4, 2009

Welcome to the website of the 8th Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science - EBICC2009. In 2009, the EBICC Conference will be held in Campinas, SP, at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - University of Campinas, from 2-4 September. The main theme of this conference will be:

Cognitive Technologies: Interdisciplinarity and Convergence
(the official language in this conference is English ... works in Portuguese only will be considered for panels)

Solving a computational problem

A major obstacle in the simulation was the time it would take for agents to generate a random production based on the evolving probabilities of their articulatory space. The idea was that for any production, a continuous value for place of articulation (the degree would be kept constant for now) would be generated and then the acoustic output would be computed. It takes at least some 2 seconds to calculate each vowel. Multiplying that by the number of agents anf the thousand/millions of turns, it would take a lot of time to run a single simulation. The solution is to make this production digital and store previously all the possible results. It will be much faster to store some 100 or 200 places of articulations (vowels only) linearly spaced. The computation time would be replaced for memory access time. With at least 100 linearly spaced points, the continuity would be present and the non-linearity of the articulatory-acoustic relation would remain intact.

With this change, it will be possible to run simulations much faster than what I estimated before and also to test most of the parameters ranges which produce stable conditions. The goal now is to have a simulation using a real vocal tract for the Abralin conference next March.

Whacky idea?

Search for the prevalence of myopia in different populations. A connection to brachiomanual gestural language?

Still making the headlines

Moe, the missing chimp from SoCal, is back to old time fame. Now, the Washington Post has a story about him. More factual information and quite touchy-feely. A sample:

Because maybe chimpanzees aren't really supposed to wear short pants and live in suburban houses with humans who treat them as their child. It never really ends well, does it? Because even though the humans love them dearly, cute baby chimps grow into big adult apes, who can bite, which can have a tragic trajectory, as we shall see.

But then again, who are we to judge, those of us who have never put a pair of pajamas on an ape.

Soon, somebody will start selling t-shirts: "Live free".

Adding insult to injury?

Continuing to report o nthe Saga of Moe, the missing chimp from CA, now the headlines try to capture the reader's attention this way:

Toilet-trained chimpanzee goes missing in Californian forest

And a touching story at the end:

The couple broke down in tears at a press conference in Los Angeles. "What am I going to do?" said Ms Davis. "He meant the world to us," said her husband. "He was the best man at my wedding."

Well, I guess he had to be toilet-trained and he is a nice chimp, otherwise he might have started to throw crap at everybody, as sometimes they do. I wonder how he was dressed...

Born to be wild

In the news today: Celebrity chimp missing in Southern California. Probably not very good for Moe (his name) and everybody in the area, I think he deserves a break. From the LA Times article:

Moe showed up at local ribbon-cutting ceremonies and helped sell Girl Scout cookies, dressed sportily in the latest fashion.

Very abusive, if you ask me, but probably not entirely without his consent, or otherwise hell could break lose. From the same article, here is what a gang of chimps can do to a person:

The 65-year-old former NASCAR driver lost all of his fingers, an eye, his nose, parts of his cheek and lips, and pieces of his torso to attacking chimpanzees in 2005. The animals pounced after apparently becoming jealous that Davis was preparing to present a birthday cake to Moe at their refuge.

Sometimes docile, sometimes nasty. Kinda like us, huh? Luyckily we have advanced culture to put some break when our instincts show up.

Can parasites influence the language we speak?

Can parasites influence the language we speak?

What do parasites and mountains have in common? They both keep populations apart and drive evolution, say researchers.

In the absence of geographical barriers such as mountains and oceans, parasite "wedges" keep populations of the same species apart, say Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in the US. They claim this can provide the opportunity for populations and even new languages to evolve separately.

Of course, it is ore of a correlation, but interesting nonetheless. Down in the the NewScientist report, Mark Pagel suggests where the causation might come from:

But rather than parasites driving linguistic diversity, Pagel believes the explanation lies in an intrinsic human tendency to wage war. "I believe humans will separate and split whenever they can," Pagel told New Scientist.

"You've got all these people wandering around the Amazon all doing more or less the same thing – hunting and gathering – so why do they all speak different languages?

"There must be some ecological force driving them to live in separate groups. We are intensely competitive and when the environment will support a small group living separately I believe humans will do that," he says.

Now it might start to get really interesting: language diversity as a the result of cultural factor behind geographical isolation. I might go for that when the simulation gets complex enough.

On the emergence and evolution of religion

On NewScientist yesterday: Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests

Kinda off-topic, but it interests me because of the software (published with the study). Of course, as an atheist, explanations for why we created religion are always interesting. A short quote from the NewScientist report:

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

The full paper can be read here.

NOT recommended

The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language by Isaac E. Mozeson

What a horrible pun. Of course I am not wasting my time wih this one, but it makes one wonder what on earth could be the argument. A nice review from Amazon:

" I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony...I'm not sure where to start. This book is full of idiocy. Yeah, that sums it up." - Tsee Lee "FRRF.org"

Just released

The Origin of Speech by Peter Macneilage

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins (ed.)

The first one is essential for the dissertation, but something tells me the second is far more interesting. Will be ordering them soon.

Althenberg 16 or the Woodstock of evolution

A high profile workshop on evolution to be held next July at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Evolution and Cognition Research. Looks promising for sure and mainstream/state of the art. Neither Kaufmann nor Piatelli-Palmarini were invited. Here is a copy of the invitation. The first paragraph:

We are writing to invite you to what we hope will be a major event to be hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Evolution and Cognition Research, in Altenberg, Austria (http://www.kli.ac.at/), on 10-13 July 2008. Our idea is nothing less than getting together a high-level group of biologists and philosophers to have a frank exchange of ideas about what, if anything, might a new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis look like.

Neo-Neo-Darwinism or a new paradigm?

Very interesting interview with Piatelli-Palmarini. So far, his ideas are way outside mainstream scientific consensus. He is co-authoring a book with Jerry Fodor about evolution with mechanisms other than natural selection. More specifically, physical invariant principles shaping organisms. It does not get away with natural selection entirely, but intends to reduce its role in evolution. Unfortunately, it might be interpreted as good ammunition to Creationists/Intelligent Design proponents, although it is serious Science. The book is expected to late 2009. Meanwhile, Stuart Kaufman's Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion is out. This one, unfortunately, might be a much easier involuntary propaganda to Creationists. I'll keep my eyes open for further developments.

On primal gesture candidates

Please take a look at the Dinafon blog. I have posted my LabPhon abstract there. It deals with a constriction location bias between C and V, which I have found in the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon (oral and written), and brought out through careful statistical analysis of the co-occurrence frequencies.
Lo and behold, the lips, the tongue blade/tip and the tongue dorsum come out as the winners. These articulators take advantage of the fact that they are used in different ways to produce C's and V's, and tend to stay where they are. In other words, C and V tend to agree in constriction location well above chance level (effect size OK). The bias is of moderate strength, and, thus, leaves room for contradictory trends to effect more distinctiveness where necessary.
There is a long way to go to demonstrate that the trend is universal, but I guess this is feasible. If it comes out as a true probabilistic universal, here is one more reason to use simple gestures with the most popular articulators to simulate the language games of our ancestors.

The first European came from Asia?

The first hominin of Europe

The earliest hominin occupation of Europe is one of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology. However, the purportedly oldest of the Early Pleistocene sites in Eurasia lack precise age control and contain stone tools rather than human fossil remains^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}. Here we report the discovery of a human mandible associated with an assemblage of Mode 1 lithic tools and faunal remains bearing traces of hominin processing, in stratigraphic level TE9 at the site of the Sima del Elefante, Atapuerca, Spain^{6, 7, 8}. Level TE9 has been dated to the Early Pleistocene (approximately 1.2–1.1 Myr), based on a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and biostratigraphy. The Sima del Elefante site thus emerges as the oldest, most accurately dated record of human occupation in Europe, to our knowledge. The study of the human mandible suggests that the first settlement of Western Europe could be related to an early demographic expansion out of Africa. The new evidence, with previous findings in other Atapuerca sites (level TD6 from Gran Dolina^{9, 10, 11, 12, 13}), also suggests that a speciation event occurred in this extreme area of the Eurasian continent during the Early Pleistocene, initiating the hominin lineage represented by the TE9 and TD6 hominins.

Nature 452, 465-469 (27 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06815; Received 15 October 2007; Accepted 4 February 2008

Orrorin tugenensis Femoral Morphology and the Evolution of Hominin Bipedalism -- Richmond and Jungers 319 (5870): 1662 -- Science

Orrorin tugenensis Femoral Morphology and the Evolution of Hominin Bipedalism -- Richmond and Jungers 319 (5870): 1662 -- Science

Bipedalism is a key human adaptation and a defining feature of the hominin clade. Fossil femora discovered in Kenya and attributed to Orrorin tugenensis, at 6 million years ago, purportedly provide the earliest postcranial evidence of hominin bipedalism, but their functional and phylogenetic affinities are controversial. We show that the O. tugenensis femur differs from those of apes and Homo and most strongly resembles those of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, indicating that O. tugenensis was bipedal but is not more closely related to Homo than to Australopithecus. Femoral morphology indicates that O. tugenensis shared distinctive hip biomechanics with australopiths, suggesting that this complex evolved early in human evolution and persisted for almost 4 million years until modifications of the hip appeared in the late Pliocene in early Homo

Generating vocal output with TaDA

What would be the first vocal gestures of hominids? The inspiration could be the vocalizations of apes, but, for now, something even simpler will do.

The idea is to use simple vowel gestures possibly with nasalization and lip rounding. Lip rounding is particularly attractive as it is a visible speech gesture that can be mimicked easily.

A (very simple) perceptual model of vowel perception will need to be adopted, so the agents can form a vowel space and start to get preferences. Maybe deBoer's model or something similar?

Implementation of gestural score generation starts today, as I am more familiar with the parameters. Output from TaDA to HLSyn without the Graphical User interface (GUI) exists only for coupling graphs, not gestural scores. That is the part which needs most of the code adaptation.

Good news is that we will be able to start simulating BP patterns real soon, as it is quite easy to implement gestural scores directly.

Broca's area in chimps?

Taglialatela JP, Russell JL, Schaeffer JA, Hopkins WD. 2008. Communicative signaling activates 'Broca's' homolog in chimpanzees. Curr Biol 18:1-6. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.049

Broca’s area, a cerebral cortical area located in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) of the human brain, has been identified as one of several critical regions associated with the motor planning and execution of language. Anatomically, Broca’s area is most often larger in the left hemisphere, and functional imaging studies in humans indicate significant left-lateralized patterns of activation during language-related tasks [1–3]. If, and to what extent, nonhuman primates, particularly chimpanzees, possess a homologous region that is involved in the production of their own communicative signals remains unknown. Here, we show that portions of the IFG as well as other cortical and subcortical regions in chimpanzees are active during the production of communicative signals. These findings are the first to provide direct evidence of the neuroanatomical structures associated with the production of communicative behaviors in chimpanzees. Significant activation in the left IFG in conjunction with other cortical and subcortical brain areas during the production of communicative signals in chimpanzees suggests that the neurological substrates underlying language production in the human brain may have been present in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

but in the conclusion:

Although these data indicate that the left IFG is involved in the production of communicative signals in chimpanzees, cytoarchitectonically, it is not clear what cell types fully comprise this region [36]. Therefore, it is not possible to determine whether or not the neuronal metabolic activity reported in this study corresponds to an area within the chimpanzee IFG that contains Brodmann’s area 44/45 cells—those cells that comprise Broca’s area in humans.

Too bad. I guess one has to manage to convince a chimp to get inside an MRI scanner and do a communicative task. Let's not forget that a chimp has the strength of six athletes.

Robert Berwick on the evolution of speech

MIT: No easy answers in evolution of human language - MIT News Office