Technology advance

It looks like there may be a burgeoning technology allowing one to watch brains in action which would be a great boon to our research efforts. More commentary as time permits.

Researchers watch brain in action
From Biosingularity

In Vivo Two-Photon Imaging Reveals a Role of Arc in Enhancing Orientation Specificity in Visual Cortex, Wang, et al. Cell, Vol 126, 389-402, 28 July 2006
[Link downloads pdf if you are subscribed to cell (i.e. on a university computer or proxied in)] Read below the fold for abstract.


Cortical representations of visual information are modified by an animal's visual experience. To investigate the mechanisms in mice, we replaced the coding part of the neural activity-regulated immediate early gene Arc with a GFP gene and repeatedly monitored visual experience-induced GFP expression in adult primary visual cortex by in vivo two-photon microscopy. In Arc-positive GFP heterozygous mice, the pattern of GFP-positive cells exhibited orientation specificity. Daily presentations of the same stimulus led to the reactivation of a progressively smaller population with greater reactivation reliability. This adaptation process was not affected by the lack of Arc in GFP homozygous mice. However, the number of GFP-positive cells with low orientation specificity was greater, and the average spike tuning curve was broader in the adult homozygous compared to heterozygous or wild-type mice. These results suggest a physiological function of Arc in enhancing the overall orientation specificity of visual cortical neurons during the post-eye-opening life of an animal.

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Offloading to the Basal Ganglia?

Interesting article this week in Scientific American about the skills of the "expert mind". The basic conclusion is that what "experts" do better or have at their disposal is the ability to manipulate more information because they have chunked it.

Scientific American: The Expert Mind [ PSYCHOLOGY AND BRAIN SCIENCE ]
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

With regard to language, I have two thoughts:
1) Though the article doesn't discuss it, this appears to align with Namhee Lee's work on the basal ganglia for procedural learning.
2) For language learning, it makes pattern finding/acquisition all the more important. It also may implicate "contextual ensembles" in which learners chunk contextual information along with linguistic information. For example, I recently called a friend overseas and her father picked up the phone. I have rarely, if ever, had to speak to another person's father in Russian. It's not that my Russian is grossly inadequate so much as the "chunks" for the sociopragmatics of that interaction were not available, making it REALLY awkward.

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Always the snake's fault

UC Davis anthro prof, Lynne Isbell, contends that evading snakes was a major agent of evolutionary change in primates.

Anthro people tend to stress hunting which is something that William Calvin picks up on his books on brain and language (e.g. Lingua ex Machina with Bickerton). Since snakes and the amygdala go together and we know that all roads lead to Rome (the amygdala), I thought I'd throw this link up. [I don't actually believe that all roads lead to the amygdala, but it does seem to come up often.]

Here's the abstract to her paper:

Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains

Lynne A. Isbell
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Isbell, L.A. 2006. Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains. Journal of Human Evolution 51:1-35.

Abstract

Current hypotheses that use visually guided reaching and grasping to explain orbital convergence, visual specialization, and brain expansion in primates are open to question now that neurological evidence reveals no correlation between orbital convergence and the visual pathway in the brain that is associated with reaching and grasping. An alternative hypothesis proposed here posits that snakes were ultimately responsible for these defining primate characteristics. Snakes have a long, shared evolutionary existence with crown-group placental mammals and were likely to have been their first predators. Mammals are conservative in the structures of the brain that are involved in vigilance, fear, and learning and memory associated with fearful stimuli, e.g., predators. Some of these areas have expanded in primates and are more strongly connected to visual systems. However, primates vary in the extent of brain expansion. This variation is coincident with variation in evolutionary co-existence with the more recently evolved venomous snakes. Malagasy prosimians have never co-existed with venomous snakes, New World monkeys (platyrrhines) have had interrupted co-existence with venomous snakes, and Old World monkeys and apes (catarrhines) have had continuous co-existence with venomous snakes. The koniocellular visual pathway, arising from the retina and connecting to the lateral geniculate nucleus, the superior colliculus, and the pulvinar, has expanded along with the parvocellular pathway, a visual pathway that is involved with color and object recognition. I suggest that expansion of these pathways co-occurred, with the koniocellular pathway being crucially involved (among other tasks) in pre-attentional visual detection of fearful stimuli, including snakes, and the parvocellular pathway being involved (among other tasks) in protecting the brain from increasingly greater metabolic demands to evolve the neural capacity to detect such stimuli quickly. A diet that included fruits or nectar (though not to the exclusion of arthropods), which provided sugars as a neuroprotectant, may have been a required preadaptation for the expansion of such metabolically active brains. Taxonomic differences in evolutionary exposure to venomous snakes are associated with similar taxonomic differences in rates of evolution in cytochrome oxidase genes and in the metabolic activity of cytochrome oxidase proteins in at least some visual areas in the brains of primates. Raptors that specialize in eating snakes have larger eyes and greater binocularity than more generalized raptors, and provide non-mammalian models for snakes as a selective pressure on primate visual systems. These models, along with evidence from paleobiogeography, neuroscience, ecology, behavior, and immunology, suggest that the evolutionary arms race begun by constrictors early in mammalian evolution continued with venomous snakes. Whereas other mammals responded by evolving physiological resistance to snake venoms, anthropoids responded by enhancing their ability to detect snakes visually before the strike.

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Get in groups of 150

Found a blog entry that does a good job of summarizing some of Dunbar's "Social Brain hypothesis." To me, Dunbar's work is interesting until it gets obsessed with neocortex size. Until cetaceans like dolphins can bomb Lebanon or over fish large swaths of ocean (or small ones) and produce an equivalent to the Macarena, it appears that big brains and even wrinklier brains do not guarantee symbolic capacity and language development.

On the other hand, the entry is interesting because it points to the repeated upper social limit of 150. This is something that the evolution of language people will want to keep and eye on. Read on for quotes from the post.



"150 seems to be the largest grouping in which everyone knows everyone else, “in which they know not simply who is who but also how each one is related to the others” (grooming, page 71). This number roughly equates to the number of living descendents a person would expect an ancestral couple to produce after four generations (Grooming, page 71). Various experiments have shown that 150 is a significant number in many sorts of human groupings. A recent study of the Church of England showed that the ideal size for congregations was less than 200. During World War II, a company has stabilized in size at around 170 soldiers. A study of Christmas card distribution lists showed that a typical person who sends such cards sends them to approximately 154 individuals."

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Feral child grown up

Here's a recent article on a Ukrainian feral child now back in "civilization" and in her 20s. She was apparently raised by a pack of dogs.

Feral children are always interesting to linguists because there is the question of language input, age, and the ability to acquire language. What interests me is the suspicion that the drive for affiliation and conspecific interaction is so high that language will be acquired to some degree to support affiliation. Just as Harlow's neglected monkeys who were really bad mothers when they grew up if they had a persistent offspring could learn how to display maternal behavior. it may never be too late to learn something. It may not be possible to have "normal" use of language, but it appears that Miss Malaya has indeed a working set of linguistic tools at her disposal even if it isn't the full complement.

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Always the amygdala

I'm wrapping up a section on Porge's Social Engagement Theory which hinges on the inhibition of the central nucleus of the amygdala in order for social engagement behaviors to kick in. And in comes the following from imagfg: Autistic boys lack certain brain cells. Now where do they lack certain brain cells? The amygdala. John Schumann has also focused on the amygdala in the past, particularly in his book the Neurobiology of Affect in Language.

Read below for Amaral's abstract on autism and the amygdala.
Stereological Analysis of Amygdala Neuron Number in Autism

Cynthia Mills Schumann and David G. Amaral
J. Neurosci. 2006 26: 7674-7679; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1285-06.2006

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and The M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, California 95817

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. David G. Amaral, The M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California, Davis, Medical Center, 2825 50th Street, Sacramento, CA 95817. Email: dgamaral@ucdavis.edu

The amygdala is one of several brain regions suspected to be pathological in autism. Previously, we found that young children with autism have a larger amygdala than typically developing children. Past qualitative observations of the autistic brain suggest increased cell density in some nuclei of the postmortem autistic amygdala. In this first, quantitative stereological study of the autistic brain, we counted and measured neurons in several amygdala subdivisions of 9 autism male brains and 10 age-matched male control brains. Cases with comorbid seizure disorder were excluded from the study. The amygdaloid complex was outlined on coronal sections then partitioned into five reliably defined subdivisions: (1) lateral nucleus, (2) basal nucleus, (3) accessory basal nucleus, (4) central nucleus, and (5) remaining nuclei. There is no difference in overall volume of the amygdala or in individual subdivisions. There are also no changes in cell size. However, there are significantly fewer neurons in the autistic amygdala overall and in its lateral nucleus. In conjunction with the findings from previous magnetic resonance imaging studies, the autistic amygdala appears to undergo an abnormal pattern of postnatal development that includes early enlargement and ultimately a reduced number of neurons. It will be important to determine in future studies whether neuron loss in the amygdala is a consistent characteristic of autism and whether cell loss occurs in other brain regions as well.

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What language?

At the heart of NLRG's work is matching mechanism with behavior. In particular, we are interested in neurobiological mechanisms for communicative behavior. I will write up our approach to neurobiology another day, but today's focus in on what we mean by language.

Language, if one reads theoretical linguistics, often gets collasped or confused with grammar. This means that language is its structure and its possible structures. No one is saying that language is unstructured. However, along with the rest of the functional linguistic community, NLRG places the use of language, its communicative function, as its most salient feature. Therefore from this perspective, language structure serves language use.

At this point, we find it difficult to understand the value of linguistic experiments based on artificially created sentences. Close analysis of everyday language use through conversation analysis indicates that the sentence types used in many of these experiments are rare in speech. (If we can get Lisa to contribute, you can get a much more detailed explanation of this.) Believing that our neurobiology is an evolved neurobiology, we are first interested in the mechanisms underlying evolved behaviors. We highly doubt that the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) included many of these types of utterances.

Therefore when we refer to language we are referring to language in use. What you hear on the streets and engage in on a day to day basis. Of course a variety of technologies press on our use of language and different contexts may call for different registers, but when we talk about the neurobiology of language we generally mean language in its everyday, relaxed form. A neurobiology of walking starts with the generic variety knowing that people can dance, skip, and jump. Those, however, are probably either extensions of the walking system or entirely other systems--likewise our view of language.

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How to post on this blog (important, please read)

In order to avoid long posts on the front page, especially articles, we need to first post a teaser and then direct viewers to the rest of post with a "read more" link. When you want to post something, you first log in with your id and then click on, of course, the "posting" tab. Next, you see two tabs on the left side of your composer, "Edit Html", and "Compose." For long postings, always click on "Edit Html" and you will see two html codes there. Place your teaser BEFORE the first code.
And the rest of the body of your post right after the first code. Note, the longer part of your post should be placed between two codes. Sorry to make the posting a little complicated. But there was no easier way to achieve this.
Thank you all.
Saeed.

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Teaching in Wild Meerkats

Science 14 July 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5784, pp. 227 - 229
DOI: 10.1126/science.1128727

Teaching in Wild Meerkats
Alex Thornton* and Katherine McAuliffe

Despite the obvious benefits of directed mechanisms that facilitate the efficient transfer of skills, there is little critical evidence for teaching in nonhuman animals. Using observational and experimental data, we show that

Teaching is ubiquitous in human societies, but although social learning is widespread in other species (1, 2), it is not yet clear how commonly teaching is involved. Teaching is characterized by the active involvement of experienced individuals in facilitating learning by naïve conspecifics (3, 4). The focus of definitions of teaching ranges from cognitive mechanisms (5, 6) to evolutionary function (3, 7). In this paper, we use a widely accepted (2, 4, 8–10) functional definition developed by Caro and Hauser (3). This definition comprises three criteria: (i) an individual, A, modifies its behavior only in the presence of a naïve observer, B; (ii) A incurs some cost or derives no immediate benefit; and (iii) as a result of A's behavior, B acquires knowledge or skills more rapidly or efficiently than it would otherwise, or that it would not have learned at all. Teaching is thought to allow faster and more efficient information transfer than passive forms of social learning (11), but evidence for its existence in nonhuman animals is equivocal (3, 4, 8–10, 12, 13). To date, only one study provides firm evidence for teaching (10), and its occurrence in the wild remains unconfirmed.

We investigated whether teaching occurs in wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta), a species living in demanding environments where food acquisition involves considerable skill. Meerkats are obligate cooperative breeders living in groups of 2 to 40 individuals in the arid regions of southern Africa. Groups comprise a dominant male and female, who are the parents of over 80% of the pups in the group, and a variable number of helpers of both sexes that aid in rearing the young (14). Hereafter, all individuals over 3 months old are referred to as helpers. Pups are initially incapable of finding their own prey. They begin to follow foraging groups at around 30 days of age and are provisioned by all group members in response to begging calls (15, 16) until they reach nutritional independence at around 90 days of age.

Meerkats are opportunistic generalists, feeding on a range of vertebrate and invertebrate prey (15), many of which are difficult to handle and potentially dangerous to young pups. Scorpions of the genera Parabuthus and Opistophthalamus, which form up to 4.5% of total prey biomass for meerkats (15), may be particularly dangerous; the former possess neurotoxins potent enough to kill a human, whereas the latter have milder toxins but are more aggressive, defending themselves with large, powerful pincers (17).

Helpers typically kill or disable prey with rapid bites to the head or abdomen before provisioning pups. Scorpions are normally disabled by removing the sting. Helpers adjust the frequency with which they kill or disable mobile prey according to pup age, gradually introducing pups to live prey. The proportion of highly mobile prey fed when dead or disabled decreased with pup age (Fig. 1, A and B) while the proportion of prey fed intact increased (Fig. 1C) (controlling for characteristics of the pups, helpers, and prey) (18) (table S1). Scorpions were more likely to be provisioned dead or disabled (Fig. 1, A and B) and less likely to be provisioned intact (Fig. 1C) than were other items.


Figure 1 Fig. 1. (A to C) Probability of highly mobile prey being fed (A) dead, (B) disabled, or (C) intact plotted against pup age. All pup age and prey type effects were significant (P <>N = 2152 feeds) in GLMM analyses (see supporting online text for details of statistical analyses). (D and E) Helper response to playback experiments. Playbacks of begging calls of pups of the same age as those in the group (control) or the opposite age extreme (expt) were broadcast to groups with foraging pups. (D) Helpers in groups with young pups (28 to 37 days old) fed significantly more intact prey under experimental than control playbacks (paired t test, t9 = 4.23, P = 0.002). (E) Helpers in groups with old pups (71 to 86 days old) fed significantly more dead prey under experimental than control playbacks (paired t test, t10 = 4.81, P = 0.001). [View Larger Version of this Image (22K GIF file)]

Helpers often fed pups that were out of sight (mean distance to pup = 5.4 m, range = 0 to 50 m, N = 1399 feeds), but pup begging calls can generally be heard by all individuals in the group (16). The acoustic parameters of begging calls are known to change with age (19). To investigate whether helpers modify prey in response to begging calls, we conducted playback experiments in which we broadcast begging calls of old pups (71 to 86 days old) to groups with young pups (28 to 37 days old) or vice versa (18). Begging calls of pups of the same age as those in the group were broadcast as controls. Helpers in groups with young pups fed significantly more intact prey when calls of older pups were broadcast than in control playbacks, and helpers in groups with old pups fed significantly more dead prey under experimental than control playbacks (Fig. 1, D and E).

After a helper gave a pup a food item, it normally remained with the pup and monitored its handling of the prey (87.5% of recorded feeds; N = 10,479 feeds). If pups did not attempt to handle a prey item, helpers sometimes nudged the item repeatedly with their nose or paws (8.3% of occasions; N = 5343 feeds). After nudging occurred, pups normally consumed the prey successfully (99% of occasions; N = 446 feeds). The duration of monitoring and the probability of nudging both declined with pup age [monitoring, analyzed with a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), gave the following results: {chi}2 = 142.04, df = 1, P < href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5784/227#FIG2">Fig. 2A and table S2); nudging (GLMM): {chi}2 = 80.23, df = 1, P <> (table S3)], suggesting that helpers modify their behavior in response to improvements in pup competence. Nudging was more common when rare prey types were presented to pups [prey abundance (GLMM): {chi}2 = 13.65, df = 1, P < href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5784/227#FIG2">Fig. 2B and table S4)], suggesting that it may direct pups' attention toward unfamiliar food.


Figure 2 Fig. 2. (A) Helper monitoring time declined with pup age (GLMM: P <>N = 1131 feeds) and was longer for live (intact or disabled) than for dead prey (P <>B) Helpers were more likely to nudge rare prey types that made up less than 10% of all pup feeds than to nudge more common prey types (GLMM: P <>N = 2487 feeds). (C) Prey losses by pups decreased with age (GLMM: P <>N = 3046 feeds). Pups were more likely to lose intact than disabled prey (P <>D) Pups found more highly mobile prey themselves (rather than being fed) as they grew older (GLMM: P <>E) Handling time for pups experimentally provisioned with stingless scorpions was higher for pups <50 src="http://www.sciencemag.org/math/ge.gif" alt="≥" border="0">80 days old (paired t test: t9 = 3.98, P = 0.003). [View Larger Version of this Image (21K GIF file)]

Helpers' killing or disabling prey before feeding a pup probably has few costs to helpers as compared to the post-provisioning costs of feeding live prey. Controlling for prey type and size (18), there was no significant difference between pre-provisioning handling times for prey provisioned dead, intact, or disabled [generalized linear model (GLM): F2,93 = 1.67, P = 0.195], suggesting that the time costs of modifying prey rather than feeding it intact are low. In contrast, there were clear post-provisioning costs involved in feeding pups live prey. These included longer times spent monitoring pups handling prey (Fig. 2A), the risk of pups losing prey (Fig. 2C and table S5), and the investment in retrieving and further modifying items lost by pups. Among 731 feeds where pups lost the prey initially, helpers retrieved prey and returned it to pups on 192 occasions (26.3%). On around 7% of occasions, helpers further modified the prey before returning it.

Helpers appear to facilitate pup skill acquisition by creating opportunities for pups to handle live prey. Young pups encounter live, highly mobile prey almost exclusively when provisioned by helpers. As pups grow older, they increasingly find such items themselves, but the mean number of items found remained below 50% of the total encountered (found by pups and fed by helpers), even for pups approaching nutritional independence (Fig. 2D). The presence of a helper after provisioning appears to have an important effect on the likelihood that pups will attempt to handle live prey. When we presented live scorpions to helpers, they removed the sting and fed the scorpion to a pup on 13 occasions. In all cases, the pup then bit the scorpion. In contrast, when we presented stingless scorpions directly to 13 littermates when no helpers were within 2 m (18), 7 did not bite the prey (Fisher's test: P = 0.005).

As pups grew older, they were less likely to lose live prey (Fig. 2C) and time taken to handle scorpions declined (Fig. 2E). To examine the effect of experience with live prey on pup handling skills, rather than age per se, we trained three littermates on 3 consecutive days by directly provisioning them each day with (i) four dead scorpions; (ii) four live, stingless scorpions; or (iii) an equivalent mass of hard-boiled egg, as a control. On the fourth day, we tested the handling abilities of all three pups by provisioning each with one live, stingless scorpion (18). We conducted the experiment on six litters in four groups. All pups trained on live scorpions successfully handled the scorpion on the fourth day, whereas those trained on dead scorpions lost the scorpion in two out of six tests and control pups lost their scorpions on four occasions. In all six trials, the pup trained on live scorpions was either the only pup to handle the scorpion successfully or had the fastest handling time (18) (Friedman test: S = 10.38, df = 5, P = 0.006). Moreover, all control pups and all pups trained on dead scorpions were pincered or pseudo-stung (struck by the stingless tail) by the scorpion during the test with a live scorpion, whereas this occurred only once in tests with pups trained on live scorpions (Fisher's test: P <>

The results of this study provide strong evidence that the provisioning behavior of meerkat helpers constitutes a form of "opportunity teaching," in which teachers provide pupils with opportunities to practice skills, thus facilitating learning (3, 7). Helpers modified their behavior in the presence of pups, gradually introducing them to live prey, monitoring their handling behavior, nudging prey, and retrieving and further modifying prey if necessary. Dangerous items were more likely to be killed or disabled than other mobile prey. Helpers gained no direct benefits from their provisioning behavior and incurred costs through giving pups prey that was difficult to handle and might escape. Finally, there was strong evidence that helper provisioning behavior plays an important role in promoting the development of pup handling skills.

It is often assumed that teaching requires awareness of the ignorance of pupils and a deliberate attempt to correct that ignorance (5, 6, 20), but viewed from a functional perspective (3), teaching can be based on simple mechanisms without the need for intentionality and the attribution of mental states. By differentially responding to the calls of pups of different ages, helpers may accelerate pups' learning of handling skills without the need for complex cognitive processes. Additional post-provisioning behavior, such as nudging and retrieving prey, may then further enhance skill acquisition.

Evidence from ants (10) and meerkats suggests that teaching, as defined by Caro and Hauser (3), may have evolved independently in many unrelated taxa. Where individuals must acquire critical skills or information but individual learning is costly or opportunities to practice are lacking, selection may favor mechanisms whereby experienced individuals actively facilitate learning by naïve conspecifics. The paucity of evidence for teaching is likely to reflect difficulties in producing unequivocal support for strict criteria rather than an absence of teaching per se. As evidence for teaching in nonhuman animals emerges, research will be in a position to look in more detail at the conditions under which teaching is likely to evolve and to relate forms of teaching found in humans and other animals in a broad framework.


References and Notes

* 1. C. M. Heyes, B. G. Galef Jr., Eds., Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture (Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1996).
* 2. D. M. Fragaszy, S. Perry, Eds., The Biology of Traditions: Models and Evidence (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2003).
* 3. T. M. Caro, M. D. Hauser, Q. Rev. Biol. 67, 151 (1992). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 4. D. Maestripieri, Hum. Nat. 6, 361 (1995). [ISI]
* 5. A. T. Pearson, The Teacher: Theory and Practice in Teacher Education (Routledge, New York, 1989).
* 6. M. Tomasello, A. C. Kruger, H. H. Ratner, Behav. Brain Sci. 16, 495 (1993). [ISI]
* 7. R. F. Ewer, Nature 222, 698 (1969). [CrossRef] [Medline]
* 8. B. G. Galef, E. E. Whiskin, G. Dewar, Anim. Behav. 70, 91 (2005).
* 9. L. Rendell, H. Whitehead, Behav. Brain Sci. 24, 309 (2001). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 10. N. R. Franks, T. Richardson, Nature 439, 153 (2006). [CrossRef] [Medline]
* 11. R. Boyd, P. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985).
* 12. C. Boesch, Anim. Behav. 41, 530 (1991). [ISI]
* 13. T. M. Caro, Cheetahs of the Serengeti Plains: Grouping in an Asocial Species (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994).
* 14. T. H. Clutton-Brock et al., Science 291, 478 (2001).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
* 15. S. P. Doolan, D. W. Macdonald, J. Zool. 239, 697 (1996). [ISI]
* 16. M. B. Manser, G. Avey, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 48, 429 (2000). [CrossRef] [ISI]
* 17. J. Leeming, Scorpions of Southern Africa (Struik, Cape Town, South Africa, 2003).
* 18. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online.
* 19. S. M. White, thesis, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (2001).
* 20. D. Cheney, R. Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990).
* 21. H. and J. Kotze kindly allowed us to work on their land, and the Northern Cape Conservation Authority granted permission to conduct the research. We are grateful for the support of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria and for the help of N. Jordan, T. Flower, N. Tayar, and volunteers who contributed to data collection. L. Hollén allowed us the use of some begging call recordings. We thank T. Clutton-Brock for supervision and access to the meerkats and S. Hodge, J. Gilchrist, K. Isvaran, A. Radford, N. Raihani, S. English, and A. Young for discussion and advice. The work was funded by a Natural Environment Research Council studentship to A.T.

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Why Meerkat study is important

So, we ended our last class (spring 06) talking about the pedagogy and how it was distinguished from general learning. I thought, this is an important finding b/c it shows that active learning can happen in almost all sorts of animals, something that was thought to belong to humans and chimps only. I think the whole science body needs to revise its definition of what is considered to be called "Learning." We Think of learning as something associated with huge brain. Not so, many animals show learning irrespective of having a huge brain such as these meerkats. Or assuming that one has to have at least a CNS. Again wrong. Aplysia have no CNS and their NS is limited to 20,000 neurons total (yes the figure is correct). Learning does not even have anything to do with neurons. Our immune system is learning constantly how to fight viruses. I would add that learning is not even a characteristic of living thing per se. Rainfall "learns" how to flow down the hill by taking certian path that have been used previously by other rainfall and not creating a new path. We have much to "learn" about learning.

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No man is an island

The insula (islands) in the brain seem to pop up repeatedly in our talks.

On the latest from our friend Marco Iacoboni from ScienceBlog:

Using powerful fMRI equipment at the Semel Institute's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the research team scanned the brains of 10 registered Democrats and 10 registered Republicans as the subjects viewed the faces of 2004 presidential contenders George Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader. The study was conducted in the heat of the campaign that year.

Viewing an opposition candidate produced signal changes in cognitive control circuitry in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), as well as in emotional regions in the insula and anterior temporal poles. The ACC is important to attention control and self-monitoring, and together with the DLPFC forms a network that monitors response conflict and, when necessary, regulates emotion.

Kaplan JT, Freedman J, Iacoboni M. (in Press). Us versus them: Political attitudes and party affiliation influence neural response to faces of presidential candidates. Neuropsychologia.

The latest incidence before this one was at a Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) conference where the degenerated region was surprisingly the insula.

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What this may become

The UCLA Neurobiology of Language Research Group (NLRG) has been in existence for an indeterminate length of time pre-dating my matriculation to UCLA in 2002. It has largely been an informal group of researchers and students with a core membership consisting of John Schumann and the graduate students he is working with at the moment. This year we are considering applying for official status with the UCLA Graduate Student Association. If that happens, this blog may move to UCLA servers.

The motivation for creating this blog is three-fold.
1) I, personally, am procrastinating on my chapter of our latest work currently provocatively titled "The Interactional Instinct" which argues that language acquisition is the product of an interactional versus a language instinct.
2) Over the years with NLRG, we have worked on a number of interesting ideas, many of which I have forgotten. I thought this would be a good venue for keeping them around.
3) Finally, it would be good to get feedback from whomever comes across this site since we tend to really like our ideas and could use help picking them apart.

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