speaker:
Olga Feher
(University of Edinburgh)
building: Dyers Brae
room: Seminar Room
see also:
additional details
host/contact: ecg5@st-andrews.ac.uk
I will present experimental findings in zebra finches and humans that make use of abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study processes shaping communication systems: individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic social–cognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans.
refID: 1811
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