Sophie Scott - The Science of Laughter from Evolution to Neuroscience
Keynote Address to British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, 10th September 2024
Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean
Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying different modes of attention manipulation. The paper also argues that the attested tendencies of great ape interaction—for instance, to be dyadic rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than ‘displaced’—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I will reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not Gricean, and distinguish several varieties of meaning that are continuous with one another. We conclude that the evolutionary origins of linguistic meaning lie in gradual changes in not communication systems as such, but rather in social cognition, and specifically in what modes of attention manipulation are enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans, and only humans, ‘language ready’.
Learning with multimodal enrichment
Cognition in the Wild
What do nonhuman primates know about each other and their social environment, how do they allocate their attention, and what are the functional consequences of social decisions in natural settings? Addressing these questions is crucial to hone in on the co-evolution of cognition, social behaviour and communication, and ultimately the evolution of intelligence in the primate order. I will present results from field experimental and observational studies on free-ranging baboons, which tap into the cognitive abilities of these animals. Baboons are particularly valuable in this context as different species reveal substantial variation in social organization and degree of despotism. Field experiments revealed considerable variation in the allocation of social attention: while the competitive chacma baboons were highly sensitive to deviations from the social order, the highly tolerant Guinea baboons revealed a confirmation bias. This bias may be a result of the high gregariousness of the species, which puts a premium on ignoring social noise. Variation in despotism clearly impacted the use of signals to regulate social interactions. For instance, male-male interactions in chacma baboons mostly comprised dominance displays, while Guinea baboon males evolved elaborate greeting rituals that serve to confirm group membership and test social bonds. Strikingly, the structure of signal repertoires does not differ substantially between different baboon species. In conclusion, the motivational disposition to engage in affiliation or aggressiveness appears to be more malleable during evolution than structural elements of the behavioral repertoire; this insight is crucial for understanding the dynamics of social evolution.
The brain: A coincidence detector between sensory experiences and internal milieu
Understanding the brain is not only intrinsically fascinating, but also highly relevant to increase our well-being since our brain exhibits a power over the body that makes it capable both of provoking illness or facilitating the healing process. Bearing in mind this dark force, brain sciences have undergone and will undergo an important revolution, redefining its boundaries beyond the cranial cavity. During this presentation, we will discuss about the communication between the brain and other systems that shapes how we feel the external word and how we think. We are starting to unravel how our organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves, hormones and other signals that we will discussed. This presentation aims at challenging a long history of thinking of bodily regulation as separate from "higher" mental processes. Four centuries ago, René Descartes famously conceptualized the mind as being separate from the body, it is time now to embody our mind.
Learning from others, helping others learn: Cognitive foundations of distinctively human social learning
Learning does not occur in isolation. From parent-child interactions to formal classroom environments, humans explore, learn, and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts. Rather than simply observing and copying their conspecifics, humans engage in a range of epistemic practices that actively recruit those around them. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart? In this talk, I will present a series of studies that reveal the remarkably sophisticated inferential abilities that young children show not only in how they learn from others but also in how they help others learn. Children interact with others as learners and as teachers to learn and communicate about the world, about others, and even about the self. The results collectively paint a picture of human social learning that is far more than copying and imitation: It is active, bidirectional, and cooperative. I will end by discussing ongoing work that extends this picture beyond what we typically call “social learning”, with implications for building better machines that learn from and interact with humans.
The evolution and development of visual complexity: insights from stomatopod visual anatomy, physiology, behavior, and molecules
Bioluminescence, which is rare on land, is extremely common in the deep sea, being found in 80% of the animals living between 200 and 1000 m. These animals rely on bioluminescence for communication, feeding, and/or defense, so the generation and detection of light is essential to their survival. Our present knowledge of this phenomenon has been limited due to the difficulty in bringing up live deep-sea animals to the surface, and the lack of proper techniques needed to study this complex system. However, new genomic techniques are now available, and a team with extensive experience in deep-sea biology, vision, and genomics has been assembled to lead this project. This project is aimed to study three questions 1) What are the evolutionary patterns of different types of bioluminescence in deep-sea shrimp? 2) How are deep-sea organisms’ eyes adapted to detect bioluminescence? 3) Can bioluminescent organs (called photophores) detect light in addition to emitting light? Findings from this study will provide valuable insight into a complex system vital to communication, defense, camouflage, and species recognition. This study will bring monumental contributions to the fields of deep sea and evolutionary biology, and immediately improve our understanding of bioluminescence and light detection in the marine environment. In addition to scientific advancement, this project will reach K-college aged students through the development and dissemination of educational tools, a series of molecular and organismal-based workshops, museum exhibits, public seminars, and biodiversity initiatives.
Interdisciplinary College
The Interdisciplinary College is an annual spring school which offers a dense state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and philosophy. It is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers from academia and industry. This year's focus theme "Flexibility" covers (but not be limited to) the nervous system, the mind, communication, and AI & robotics. All this will be packed into a rich, interdisciplinary program of single- and multi-lecture courses, and less traditional formats.
Designing temporal networks that synchronize under resource constraints
Being fundamentally a non-equilibrium process, synchronization comes with unavoidable energy costs and has to be maintained under the constraint of limited resources. Such resource constraints are often reflected as a finite coupling budget available in a network to facilitate interaction and communication. In this talk, I will show that introducing temporal variation in the network structure can lead to efficient synchronization even when stable synchrony is impossible in any static network under the given budget. Our strategy is based on an open-loop control scheme and alludes to a fundamental advantage of temporal networks. Whether this advantage of temporality can be utilized in the brain is an interesting open question.
Physical Computation in Insect Swarms
Our world is full of living creatures that must share information to survive and reproduce. As humans, we easily forget how hard it is to communicate within natural environments. So how do organisms solve this challenge, using only natural resources? Ideas from computer science, physics and mathematics, such as energetic cost, compression, and detectability, define universal criteria that almost all communication systems must meet. We use insect swarms as a model system for identifying how organisms harness the dynamics of communication signals, perform spatiotemporal integration of these signals, and propagate those signals to neighboring organisms. In this talk I will focus on two types of communication in insect swarms: visual communication, in which fireflies communicate over long distances using light signals, and chemical communication, in which bees serve as signal amplifiers to propagate pheromone-based information about the queen’s location.
Analogy as a Catalyst for Cumulative Cultural Evolution
Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture, by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed new light on the coevolution of cognition and culture, and addresses recent calls for better integration of the field of cultural evolution with cognitive science. This talk will address what cumulative cultural evolution is, how we define analogy-building, how analogy-building applies to cumulative cultural evolution, how analogy-building fits into language evolution, and the implications of analogy-building for causal understanding and cognitive evolution.
Neural systems for vocal perception
For social animals, successfully communicating with others is essential for interactions and survival. My research aims to answer a central question on the neuronal basis of this ability, from the perspective of the listener: how do our brains enable us to communicate with each other? My work develops nonhuman animal models to study the behavioural and neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of vocal patterns. I will start by providing an overview of my past research characterizing the neuronal-level substrates of voice processing along the primate temporal lobe. I will then focus on my current work on vocal perception in mice, in which I utilize natural male-female courtship behaviour to evaluate the acoustic dimensions extracted by listeners from ultrasonic sequences. I will then talk about ongoing work investigating the neuronal substrates supporting the perception of behaviourally relevant acoustic cues from mouse vocal sequences.