Cognitive Labs

Using specially designed computer games, researchers probe the behavior of the orange-colored primate at the zoo in Atlanta, GA in an effort to better understand patterns of social behavior...


The AP article:

Four-year-old Bernas isn't the computer wizard his mom is, but he's learning. Just the other day he used his lips and feet to play a game on the touch-screen monitor as his mom, Madu, swung from vines and climbed trees.

The two Sumatran orangutans at Zoo Atlanta are playing computer games while researchers study the cognitive skills of the orange and brown primates.

The best part? Zoo visitors get to watch their every move.

The orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blend in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.

"That's so cool," Jeri McCarthy told her three daughters as Bernas drew a red, blue and yellow picture on the screen. "He can't get enough!"

Zoo officials hope the exhibit will raise awareness of the rapidly diminishing wild orangutan population, which is on track to completely disappear in the next decade, and potentially provide keys to their survival.

"The more we understand about orangutan's cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo. "It enables us to show the public how smart they are."

In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals — correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.

The computer games, which volunteers from IBM spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.

The data will help researchers learn about socializing patterns, such as whether they mimic others or learn behavior from scratch through trial and error, said Elliott Albers with the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.

Researchers hope the data can point to new conservation strategies to help the 37,000 orangutans living in the wild on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

"Hopefully we can get the animals to find better sources of food more easily," Albers said.

The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago are also conducting such orangutan research. Visitors can also watch the animals use computers at the National Zoo, Stoinski said.

Labels: ibm, orangutan, science, social

A new imaging study shows that when we learn a new action with associated sounds, the brain quickly makes links between regions responsible for performing the action and those associated with the sound.

The findings may contribute to understanding how we acquire language and how we think of actions if we only hear their sounds, say authors Amir Lahav, ScD, and Gottfried Schlaug, MD, PhD, of the neurology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. Their work is described in the January 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

"The findings have implications for understanding many complex processes, such as speech and music performance," says Robert Zatorre, PhD, "and they could encourage research into rehabilitative strategies using sound-movement tasks." Zatorre heads the auditory cognitive neuroscience laboratory at McGill University.

The authors also suggest that their findings provide evidence for the existence of a mirror neuron system in humans. Mirror neurons, first described in monkeys, are active not only when the monkey performs an action, but also when it sees the action performed by others or only hears the sound associated with the action. Some scientists debate their existence and function in humans.

The researchers taught nine subjects with no previous musical training to play a five-note, 24-second song on a keyboard. Then they ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while the subjects listened to the song they had just learned, a different song using the same five notes, and a third song made up of additional notes.

When the subjects listened to the familiar music, their brains showed activity in a network of areas in the frontal and parietal lobes that are involved in the control of movements. The authors note that Broca's area, the human equivalent of the area in the brain where mirror neurons were found in monkeys, was particularly active when subjects listened to music they knew how to play compared with equally familiar music they did not know how to play.

"Mirror-neuron circuits appear to encode and reflect templates for specific actions," the authors say. "This may allow us to comprehend motor acts when they are observed or heard, without the need for explicit reasoning about them." The authors also suggest that the sound-related functions of a mirror-neuron system "might have developed for survival reasons, allowing us to understand actions even when they cannot be observed, but can only be heard, as when we hear footsteps in the dark."

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, International Foundation for Music Research, and Dudley Allen Sargent Research Fund.

Labels: brain, neuroscience, social, sounds

Meet-ups are being organized for cyberenthusiasts who are as focused on optimizing the mind as the body. The link refers to a social forum for the exchange of bio-enabled gadgets, such as an MP3 player that is psynched with biofeedback. (This feature exists in some audio software packages)

What does it all mean? Fuzzier lines between human and machine. It is our belief (really, your belief) that the adoption of socially-oriented technology, which is reminiscent of some of the earliest popular websites which, not surprisingly, tended to be community-driven, will become further fused with mind and body.

There was a recent observation that instant messaging appeared to be "speeding up the brain" of users. Certainly we've seen those effects here when a meme starts spreading through IM (instant messaging) with lightning speed.

In a manner of seconds different groups or 'colonies' on the planet have formed their own opinion based on their unique grok.

Thinking back 10 or 20 years, you'll recall that communications did not work that way - when the phone was the major force in distance-based human dialog. This purposeful and not entirely random cognitive stimulus will possibly speed up the pace of evolution. It is exactly the kind of transformation that has ocurred in the distant past when environment and ecology intruded into human development, forcing an evolutionary response. Let's see where it takes us.

Labels: colonies, cyber, gadget, grok, im, social