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HTML Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks
crazydoggers wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Very likely this experiment suffered from a lack of thorough double
blind control. Researcher bias may have generated subtle subconscious
queues to the chicks on which shape to pick unrelated to the sounds.
saalweachter wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
As someone with a passing familiarity with both baby chicks and
experimental setups, I have strong doubts about this research.
K0balt wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
I wonder if this is a result of a Fourier transform type operation that
turns the serial time domain into something that can be processed in
parallel?
Strilanc wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
For each chick they do 24 trials divided into 4 blocks with retraining
on the ambiguous shape and actual rewards after each block. During the
actual tests they didn't give rewards. In figure 1 they show the data
bucketed by trial index. It's a bit surprising it doesn't show any
apparent effect vs trial number, e.g. the first trial after retraining
being slightly different.
I have to admit I'm super skeptical there's not some stupid mistake
here. Definitely thought provoking. But I wish they'd kept iteratively
removing elements until the correlation stopped happening, so they
could nail down causation more precisely.
bad_username wrote 17 hours 49 min ago:
Objects that have sharp edges generate higher frequency harmonics when
agitated, because lower-size features resonate on higher frequencies
(like shorter strings ring on higher pitch). Objects that are round
resonate on low frequencies only. The "kiki" sound has more high
frequency content than the "bouba" sound, and it's no mystery why the
brain associates one with the other.
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
So then the mystery would be why other primates do not appear to show
the bouba-kiki effect ...
GuB-42 wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
That's one theory. Another one I can think of is that sharp edges are
scary, and most distress calls are high pitched.
Also, the thing about high frequencies and sharp edges lead to a
contradiction: babies are more round than adults and produce higher
pitched sounds, this is almost universal across all species.
There are other tentative explanations, such as how the vocal tract
acts when producing these sounds, with "bouba" sounds being the
result of smoother movement more reminiscent of a round shape.
"kiki" is not just higher pitched, it is also "shaped" differently if
you look at the sound envelope, with, as expected, sharper
transitions.
So to me, the mystery is still there. Is is the kind of thing that
sounds obvious, in the same way that kiki sounds obviously sharper
than bouba, but is not.
aaptel wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
I thought the same but they used chicks that just hatched with zero
world experience.
amelius wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
World experience can be encoded through evolution.
E.g. a spider does not learn if/how to weave a web from its
parents.
IsTom wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
In nature there's few things laying around that resonate particularly
well.
maybewhenthesun wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
Scratch a thin pointy branch across e rock -> sharp high noise.
Thump a round club/log against a rock -> dull bump noise
IsTom wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
Thump two round rocks together -> sharp noise
Thump pointy branch against a tree -> dull noise
And chickens aren't using tools.
sixsevenrot wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
I challenge you to find two objects of a similar size and cut
them into shapes that would produce a sharper sound for the
rounder object.
In your example it's obviously the round tree trunk that
produces the dull sound.
blurbleblurble wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
They're scratching for gizzard stones and food though, with
their built-in beak, fwiw
mnbs wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
That's what I was thinking. But then I was wondering: if it was that
obvoius, would there be such research about it?
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
Some of the research, including this paper, is trying to get at the
question of whether a species' sensitivity to the bouba-kiki effect
might be at the root of language or not. Since it seems accepted
that chickens do not have language in any meaningful sense of that
term, finding that they still show this effect decouples it from
"the origins of language".
rcxdude wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
It's a hypothesis. How would you prove or disprove that it's
because of that? (and I would say, a priori, it's not utterly
obvious that the brain would relate spacial and temporal
frequencies like this)
ACCount37 wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
You do need to research "obvious" things every once in a while.
They have this annoying tendency of being proven wrong
occasionally.
patcon wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
I'm very intrigued by this, but I'll be much more interested when this
is replicated on non-domesticated animals...!
It must take some strange things to survive co-evolution with humans
for several thousands years
keyle wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
I'm not entirely sold by this discovery. For example when you learn to
train dogs, you learn about the 3 voices. Encouraging voice, atta boy,
negative voice, more stern, and the big "NO!".
To some degree these words type sounding language are doing the same
thing. Some sounds will irk, some will soothe, and it would affect this
'evidence' found.
spagettnet wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
I think the researchers agree with your premise. The âevidenceâ
is not that chicks have more language understanding than previously
understood, but rather that the source of the universality of
bouba/kiki is due to something more primitive than built in human
language hardware.
gnarlouse wrote 1 day ago:
baba is keke
the__alchemist wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
baba is you
alienbaby wrote 1 day ago:
Is this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains fricatives and
stops or not? They produce spiky sounds
But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes,
though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in
frequency?
I'd be interested on results of shapes imagined when you take the
source as musical or other non speech sounds.
canjobear wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
> But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes,
though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in
frequency?
Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being sharp
in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing. There's no
guarantee any given organism would make the connection.
fzeindl wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
In the book âthe design of everyday thingsâ it is mentioned
that ânatural mappingsâ exist. Moving the knob of a vertical
slider to the upper end universally means âbrighterâ or
âlouderâ, not âless brightâ or âmore silentâ.
seba_dos1 wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
Which way would a vertical weight slider go?
IsTom wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
> Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end
universally means âbrighterâ or âlouderâ, not âless
brightâ or âmore silentâ.
Except for the organ drawbars?
5- wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
maybe the chicks and norman get it, but i'm currently renting an
apartment in france that has a bunch of these light switches
installed all upside down, with "-" at the top:
HTML [1]: https://www.legrand.com.gh/en/catalog/products/arteor-pu...
oasisaimlessly wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
I don't think it's abstract at all. Rub something sharp (anything
from a stick to a phonograph needle) on an object and you'll
directly transcribe its spatial frequency spectrum into an audio
frequency spectrum.
canjobear wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Do you think it's obvious that a chick would understand that
connection?
selridge wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
>But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes
I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined. Because we
failed to replicate this experiment on other primates, we couldn't
avoid a semantic suspicion about those associations. Now we probably
have to set semantics aside or let it get a lot weirder, because we
can replicate across ~300My.
>surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in
frequency?
Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the best
framing, but the representation could also carry harder to think
about things like "harm".
It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was chosen
due to methodological convenience for linguists and cultural
anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not neuroscientists or
signal processing folks. We could potentially find other experiments
quickly, since chicks are a model organism and the mechanism is
clear.
Things could move fast here.
jaffa2 wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs natural to think of this in terms of frequencies so the
kiki shape has a higher visual frequency. As does the word have a
higher audio frequencies within in than bouba so that is naturally
associated with the lower frequency undulating line of that shape.
downboots wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
[1] it's a good analogy.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280619
thesmtsolver2 wrote 1 day ago:
All the universal translators in fiction make more sense now lol.
tetris11 wrote 1 day ago:
What's the N value of this study
Recursing wrote 1 day ago:
From the preprint linked above:
> We tested a total of 42 subjects, 17 of which were females.
selridge wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
The published one repeated the experiment w/ day old chicks and
IIRC the same number w/ the same results, so it's got a little more
N than the preprint.
shermantanktop wrote 1 day ago:
I donât know, but it really should be in units of N dozen.
a115ltd wrote 1 day ago:
This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain encodes
structural similarity across modalities. Corollary: language is far
from arbitrary labels for things.
andrewflnr wrote 1 day ago:
No, language is still pretty close to arbitrary labels. The handful
of tenuous common threads like the bouba-kiki effect don't change the
overall picture that much. The simple fact that language varies as
much as it does is sufficient to prove that it's only loosely bound
to anything universal.
downboots wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
suddenlybananas wrote 1 day ago:
>language is far from arbitrary labels for things
I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the sign.
Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled." The fact
there are systematic tendencies among languages in how things are
called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign, they could have
been called other things. We can also decide to refer to things by
another name and we can use any arbitrary name we like! There is no
limits on what names we can use (besides silly physiological
constraints like having a word with 50 000 consonants). But, of
course, there's much more to language than just labels!
For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-Ã -vis language is
that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our
language.
naniwaduni wrote 1 day ago:
Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so many
epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a warning against
overgeneralization than an insight with any significant predictive
power in its own right.
suddenlybananas wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
Let's call the arbitrariness of the sign, blinga. Why do you
think blinga requires "epicycles"? Blinga makes pretty modest
claims: there is no requirement that the form of a sign matches
that which it signifies in any way.
AreShoesFeet000 wrote 1 day ago:
Believe it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of
civilization.
mastercheif wrote 1 day ago:
Okay Gemini
ChrisClark wrote 1 day ago:
If you don't recognize a quote, it's obviously AI? Might want to
rethink your logic, or outsource it to AI. Might help you
boppo1 wrote 1 day ago:
Please elaborate.
AreShoesFeet000 wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
This is irony. The study is stupid, society has reached a stupid
stage of development. Kiki and bouba explain nothing and serve
nothing. Culture is in shambles.
verteu wrote 1 day ago:
Preprint:
HTML [1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1.fu...
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