Robots get around by mimicking primates

By mimicking how primates visualise an unfamiliar environment - a process called mental rotation - researchers are building a new kind of guidance system for robots.

Many species of animals perform mental rotation - a poorly understood aspect of spatial reasoning that is nonetheless an integral part of high-level cognition.

"If I tell you to turn left, you will probably ask whose left, mine or yours?" says Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who is leading the effort to incorporate this technique into software for controlling robots. "You have to transform your frame of reference," he says.

The team is now testing their software in a lab setting. The researchers first supply the robot with a destination - a simplified image of how objects in their environment will look from a given perspective. The robot then uses depth information from an on-board Kinect motion sensor to establish how objects look in its surroundings.

Once it has built a picture of where it is, the robot “mentally” rotates the orientation of objects to match its destination, and then plots a path. As it trundles along, it continues to take images of its surroundings and compare them to its destination, just to make sure it is on the right track. In tests, a small four-wheeled robot used this method to find its way 6 metres across a lab floor to the right spot.

It’s a humble beginning, but Arkin says it’s the first time a robot has demonstrated the ability to receive visual instructions and act on them without a map. The work will be presented in December at the ROBIO conference in Guangzhou, China. “When the world isn’t as you expect it to be, this will help you,” he says, adding that the system could also be adapted to use speech recognition software to understand voice commands and use them to build a picture of the destination being described.

Study finds that like human children, vervet monkeys learn by copying others

The new study, by Professor Andrew Whiten and Dr Erica van de Waal, shows that vervet monkeys learn by copying others in their group, as human children do.

The research found that monkeys were able to discover new techniques for obtaining food by mimicking the behaviour of others within their group. Not only that, but the same techniques then spread to other group members in the same way.

In four different groups, three different techniques spread, supporting the theory that these methods were passed on rather than learned individually.

The researchers believe vervet monkeys, like human children, are shaped by copying others and in this way come to be members of their cultural group.

Professor Whiten, Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, commented, “Our research is revealing that primates other than humans share some of our own reliance on doing as others do in our group.”

New Study Reveals How Humans Became Right-Handed

According to a new study led by Dr Gillian Forrester of the University of Sussex, a predominance to be right-handed is not a uniquely human trait but one shared by great apes.

The study, published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, analyzed hand actions directed towards either objects or individuals in chimpanzees, gorillas and children, and found that all three species are right-handed for actions to objects, but not for actions directed to individuals.

The results support a theory that human right-handedness is a trait developed through tool use that was inherited from an ancestor common to both humans and great apes. The findings challenge a widely held view that right-handed dominance in humans was a species-unique trait linked to the emergence of language.

“Humans have been tool users for 2.5 million years, while the current view is that language only emerged one hundred thousand years ago,” Dr Forrester said. “Our findings provide the first non-invasive results from naturalistic behavior, suggesting that language emerged as a consequence of left hemisphere brain regions that were already evolved to process regular sequences of actions. The structure found in language may have developed from pre-existing brain processes adapted from experience with tool-use.”

When Less Is More: Evolutionary Origins of the Affect Heuristic

The human mind is built for approximations. When considering the value of a large aggregate of different items, for example, we typically do not summate the many individual values. Instead, we appear to form an immediate impression of the likeability of the option based on the average quality of the full collection, which is easier to evaluate and remember. While useful in many situations, this affect heuristic can lead to apparently irrational decision-making. For example, studies have shown that people are willing to pay more for a small set of high-quality goods than for the same set of high-quality goods with lower-quality items added [e.g. 1]. We explored whether this kind of choice behavior could be seen in other primates. In two experiments, one in the laboratory and one in the field, using two different sets of food items, we found that rhesus monkeys preferred a highly-valued food item alone to the identical item paired with a food of positive but lower value. This finding provides experimental evidence that, under certain conditions, macaque monkeys follow an affect heuristic that can cause them to prefer less food. Conservation of this affect heuristic could account for similar ‘irrational’ biases in humans, and may reflect a more general complexity reduction strategy in which averages, prototypes, or stereotypes represent a set or group.

In a study published in The American Naturalist, a group of scientists led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have used a technique developed to study human consumer choices to investigate what influences a baboon’s foraging decisions. The technique, known as discrete choice modelling, has rarely been used before in animal behaviour research. It showed how baboons not only consider many social and non-social factors when making foraging decisions, but also how they change these factors depending on their habitat and their own social traits.

For 25 years, the rhesus monkeys were kept semi-starved, lean and hungry. The males’ weights were so low they were the equivalent of a 6-foot-tall man who tipped the scales at just 120 to 133 pounds. The hope was that if the monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe people, their evolutionary cousins, would, too. Some scientists, anticipating such benefits, began severely restricting their own diets.

The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.

Bonobo genius makes stone tools like early humans did

Kanzi the bonobo continues to impress. Not content with learning sign language or making up “words” for things like banana or juice, he now seems capable of making stone tools on a par with the efforts of early humans.

New genetic data shows humans and great apes diverged earlier than thought

To calculate when a species diverged, researchers look at the average age of members of the species when they give birth and mutation rates. The older the average age, the more time it takes for mutations to cause changes. Insects that produce offspring in a matter of months, for example, can adapt much more quickly to environmental changes than large animals that produce offspring many years after they themselves are born. To find such data for both chimps and gorillas, the research team worked with many groups in Africa that included studies of the animals that totaled 105 gorillas and 226 chimps. They also looked at fossilized excrement that contained DNA data. In so doing they found that the average age of giving birth for female chimps was 25 years old. They then divided the number of mutations found by the average age of birth to get the mutation rate. In so doing, they found it to be slower than humans, which meant that estimates based on it to calculate divergence times were likely off by as much as a million years.

The end result of the team’s research indicates that humans and chimps likely diverged some seven to eight million years ago, while the divergence of gorillas (which led to both humans and chimps) came approximately eight to nineteen million years ago. To put the numbers in perspective, humans and Neanderthals split just a half to three quarters of a million years ago.