Posts tagged communication
Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain
How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar.
He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution.
Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature.
Filed under Steven Pinker linguistics language language acquisition language production communication evolution psychology neuroscience science
Insects change the way they communicate when drowned out by man-made noises
Birds and frogs do it, even whales have been known to do it. Now scientists have for the first time shown that insects also change the way they sing to one another when drowned out by man-made noises.
Click HERE to listen to a grasshopper battling traffic noise
Grasshoppers living next to a main road respond to the increased background volume of passing traffic by adjusting their summer courtship songs, scientists have discovered.
In order to make themselves heard above the low-rumble noise pollution of moving vehicles, male bow-winged grasshoppers of central Europe alter the pitch of their songs’ lower notes so that they rise to a mini-crescendo, the scientists found.
“Bow-winged grasshoppers produce songs that include low and high frequency components,” said Ulrike Lampe of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, who led the study published in the journal Functional Ecology.
“We found that grasshoppers from noisy habitats boost the volume of the lower-frequency part of their song, which makes sense since road noise can mask signals in this part of the frequency spectrum,” Dr Lampe said.
Filed under insects animal behavior communication frequency adaptation environment neuroscience science
Brain-damaged man ‘aware’ of scientists’ questions
A crash victim thought to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade has used the power of thought to tell scientists he is not in pain.
Canadian Scott Routley, from London, Ontario, communicated with researchers via a brain scan, proving that he is conscious and aware. It is the first time such a severely brain-damaged patient has been able to provide clinically relevant information to doctors.
British neuroscientist Professor Adrian Owen, who leads the research team at the Brain and Mind Institute of Western Ontario, said: “Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is.”
Prof Owen was speaking on a BBC Panorama programme to be broadcast on Tuesday night.
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Filed under brain brain damage communication neuroscience psychology thinking vegetative state consciousness science
New research reveals more about how the brain processes facial expressions and emotions
Facial mimicry—a social behavior in which the observer automatically activates the same facial muscles as the person she is imitating—plays a role in learning, understanding, and rapport. Mimicry can activate muscles that control both smiles and frowns, and evoke their corresponding emotions, positive and negative. The studies reveal new roles of facial mimicry and some of its underlying brain circuitry.
New findings show that:
- Special brains cells dubbed “eye cells” activate in the amygdala of a monkey looking into the eyes of another monkey, even as the monkey mimics the expressions of its counterpart (Katalin Gothard, MD, PhD, abstract 402.02).
- Social status and self-perceptions of power affect facial mimicry, such that powerful individuals suppress their smile mimicry towards other high-status people, while powerless individuals mimic everyone’s smile (Evan Carr, BS, abstract 402.11).
- Brain imaging studies in monkeys have revealed the specific roles of different regions of the brain in understanding facial identity and emotional expression, including one brain region previously identified for its role in vocal processing (Shih-pi Ku, PhD, abstract 263.22).
- Subconscious facial mimicry plays a strong role in interpreting the meaning of ambiguous smiles (Sebastian Korb, PhD, abstract 402.23).
Another recent finding discussed shows that:
- Early difficulties in interactions between parents and infants with cleft lip appear to have a neurological basis, as change in a baby’s facial structure can disrupt the way adult brains react to a child (Christine Parsons, PhD).
(Image Credit: iStockphoto/Joan Vicent Cantó Roig)
Filed under Neuroscience 2012 behavior brain communication emotion facial expressions neuroscience perception science
Explaining the origins of word order using information theory
The majority of languages — roughly 85 percent of them — can be sorted into two categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is subject-verb-object (“the girl kicks the ball”), and those, like Japanese, in which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb (“the girl the ball kicks”).
The reason for the difference has remained somewhat mysterious, but researchers from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences now believe that they can account for it using concepts borrowed from information theory, the discipline, invented almost singlehandedly by longtime MIT professor Claude Shannon, that led to the digital revolution in communications. The researchers will present their hypothesis in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Shannon was largely concerned with faithful communication in the presence of “noise” — any external influence that can corrupt a message on its way from sender to receiver. Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive sciences at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper, argues that human speech is an example of what Shannon called a “noisy channel.”
“If I’m getting an idea across to you, there’s noise in what I’m saying,” Gibson says. “I may not say what I mean — I pick up the wrong word, or whatever. Even if I say something right, you may hear the wrong thing. And then there’s ambient stuff in between on the signal, which can screw us up. It’s a real problem.” In their paper, the MIT researchers argue that languages develop the word order rules they do in order to minimize the risk of miscommunication across a noisy channel.
[E. Gibson, S.T. Piantadosi, K. Brink, L. Bergen, E. Lim, and R. Saxe. A noisy-channel account of crosslinguistic word order variation. Psychological Science, accepted, 2012]
Filed under language information theory miscommunication communication word order neuroscience science
Singing Mice Show Signs of Learning
Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren’t alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males’ ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat similar to humans and song-learning birds, which they may use to change their sounds, according to a new study.
"We are claiming that mice have limited versions of the brain and behavior traits for vocal learning that are found in humans for learning speech and in birds for learning song," said Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, who oversaw the study. The results appear Oct. 10 in PLOS ONE and are further described in a review article in Brain and Language.
[Arriaga, G. et. al. (2012) “Mouse vocal communication system: are ultrasounds learned or innate?” Brain and Language]
The discovery contradicts scientists’ 60-year-old assumption that mice do not have vocal learning traits at all. “If we’re not wrong, these findings will be a big boost to scientists studying diseases like autism and anxiety disorders,” said Jarvis, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The researchers who use mouse models of the vocal communication effects of these diseases will finally know the brain system that controls the mice’s vocalizations.”
Filed under mice vocal learning learning communication singing neuroscience psychology science
University of Miami researchers find that babies’ non-verbal communication skills can help predict outcomes in children at high risk of developing Autism
Approximately 19 percent of children with a sibling diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) will develop Autism due to shared genetic and environmental vulnerabilities, according to previous studies. For that reason, University of Miami (UM) psychologists are developing ways to predict the occurrence of ASD in high-risk children, early in life, in hopes that early intervention will lead to better outcomes in the future. Their findings are published in the journal Infancy.
The study is one of the first to show that measures of non-verbal communication in children, as young as eight months of age, predict autism symptoms that become evident by the third year of life. The results suggest that identifying children, who are having difficulties early enough, can enhance the effects of interventions.
Filed under brain communication autism ASD non-verbal communication neuroscience psychology science
Marketers are using neuroscience to create advertising which speaks directly to your brain.
How do you decide which running shoes to buy? Why do you prefer the iPhone over all other smart phones? Why did smokers crave a cigarette after watching an ad designed to turn people off smoking, while non-smokers were disgusted by it? These are the questions advertisers, marketers and market researchers are constantly faced with and Swinburne Neuroscience Professor Richard Silberstein has some of the answers.
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Filed under science neuromarketing neuroscience advertising emotion SST communication
Researchers from the University of York are fitting one thousand northern hairy wood ants with tiny radio receivers in a world first experiment at the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire to find out how they communicate and travel between their complex nests.
Filed under science neuroscience communication radio receivers biology Hairy wood ants ants
Singing mice (scotinomys teguina) are not your average lab rats. Their fur is tawny brown instead of the common white albino strain; they hail from the tropical cloud forests in the mountains of Costa Rica; and, as their name hints, they use song to communicate.
University of Texas at Austin researcher Steven Phelps is examining these unconventional rodents to gain insights into the genes that contribute to the unique singing behavior—information that could help scientists understand and identify genes that affect language in humans.
The song of the singing mouse is a rapid-fire string of high-pitched chirps called trills mostly used by males in dominance displays and to attract mates. Up to 20 chirps are squeaked out per second, sounding similar to birdsong to untrained ears. But unlike birds, the mice generally stick to a song made up of only a single note.
“They sound kind of soft to human ears, but if you slow them down by about three-fold they are pretty dramatic," said Phelps.
Filed under animals biology communication language deficits neuroscience science singing mice FOXP2 language
![Explaining the origins of word order using information theory
The majority of languages — roughly 85 percent of them — can be sorted into two categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is subject-verb-object (“the girl kicks the ball”), and those, like Japanese, in which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb (“the girl the ball kicks”).
The reason for the difference has remained somewhat mysterious, but researchers from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences now believe that they can account for it using concepts borrowed from information theory, the discipline, invented almost singlehandedly by longtime MIT professor Claude Shannon, that led to the digital revolution in communications. The researchers will present their hypothesis in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Shannon was largely concerned with faithful communication in the presence of “noise” — any external influence that can corrupt a message on its way from sender to receiver. Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive sciences at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper, argues that human speech is an example of what Shannon called a “noisy channel.”
“If I’m getting an idea across to you, there’s noise in what I’m saying,” Gibson says. “I may not say what I mean — I pick up the wrong word, or whatever. Even if I say something right, you may hear the wrong thing. And then there’s ambient stuff in between on the signal, which can screw us up. It’s a real problem.” In their paper, the MIT researchers argue that languages develop the word order rules they do in order to minimize the risk of miscommunication across a noisy channel.
[E. Gibson, S.T. Piantadosi, K. Brink, L. Bergen, E. Lim, and R. Saxe. A noisy-channel account of crosslinguistic word order variation. Psychological Science, accepted, 2012]](http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbpdvc3wG11rog5d1o1_500.jpg)
![Singing Mice Show Signs of Learning
Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren’t alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males’ ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat similar to humans and song-learning birds, which they may use to change their sounds, according to a new study.
"We are claiming that mice have limited versions of the brain and behavior traits for vocal learning that are found in humans for learning speech and in birds for learning song," said Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, who oversaw the study. The results appear Oct. 10 in PLOS ONE and are further described in a review article in Brain and Language.[Arriaga, G. et. al. (2012) “Mouse vocal communication system: are ultrasounds learned or innate?” Brain and Language]
The discovery contradicts scientists’ 60-year-old assumption that mice do not have vocal learning traits at all. “If we’re not wrong, these findings will be a big boost to scientists studying diseases like autism and anxiety disorders,” said Jarvis, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The researchers who use mouse models of the vocal communication effects of these diseases will finally know the brain system that controls the mice’s vocalizations.”](http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbq8pdtDce1rog5d1o1_400.jpg)
