Relational Symmetry in the Baboon: towards symbols and language

Project Information

SymBa

Grant agreement ID: 899068

DOI

10.3030/899068

Project closed

EC signature date 7 April 2020

Start date 1 May 2020

End date 31 July 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 707,84

EU contribution

€ 184 707,84

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SymBa (Relational Symmetry in the Baboon: towards symbols and language)

Reporting period: 2020-05-01 to 2022-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In this 2-year project, we had proposed to try to resolve a paradox.
On the one hand, non-human animals such as monkeys or birds are known to be endowed with advanced skills at high cognitive levels (metacognition, decision making, theory of mind, etc.).
On the other hand, the same animals are thought to have a basic incapacity in a low cognitive levels, that of encoding bidirectional associations between simple stimuli - the capacity is called "Associative Symmetry". In contrast, humans appear to be proficient in associative symmetry and it is thought that this capacity confers them with an enhanced ability to acquire language, notably for the mental bidirectional (=symmetrical) relations between words and the objects/actions they refer to.
Such a situation appears untenable scientifically and may represent a big deficiency in our understanding of how cognition, and brains in general, work. Resolving this paradox thus has the potential to remove a large stumbling block.

We set out to conduct a series of behavioral experiments in a non-human model species (the Guinea baboon), taking advantage of our world-unique computerized setup for automatized experiments, located in Rousset close to Marseille. In complement, we decided to conduct behavioral experiments on human participants in the lab as well as on the Internet, again taking advantage of the latest technology for automatized computerized data acquisition. The goal of these experiments was to test whether in baboons associative symmetry is really absent, and whether in humans it is as robust as generally reported. If both our hypothesis were true, this would call for reconsideration of the alleged cognitive gap of "Associative Symmetry" and question our understanding of human specificities. Next to empirical work, our aim was to also critically examine the evidence available in the human literature, as well as potentially come up with new theoretical propositions to integrate or findings in the existing data and theory. Success with this agenda would help resolve contradictions in our accounts of cognitive capacities in species other than humans, and contribute to improving our understanding of the basis of language acquisistion in humans.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

This 2-year project has provided the opportunity to train several students: 2 Master students from ENSAI Rennes (a reknown French college for Statistics), 3 Bachelor students from Aix-Marseille Université (1 of which was then recruited as data engineer during the project)

The quality of the work conducted during the project is attested in several ways.
At least six scientific articles have originated / will originate from the project: 3 experimental ones, 2 theoretical ones, 1 review (see list of publications below). Two of the supervised students (Dahmani, Sabatier) are co-authors in one of the article being prepared.
The work has led to presentations in major international scientific conferences: Naturally and Artificially Intelligent Systems 2020 (NAISys, Cold Spring Harbour, USA), Psychonomics Society 2021 (USA/virtual), Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning 2022 (San Sebastian, Spain), European Society for Cognitive Psychology 2022 (ESCoP, Lille, France). The work has also been presented in other institutes or workshops during several invited talks (Chunked ANR consortium, Grenoble, France, January 2022; Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Paris, France, May 2022; Institute for Language, Communication and the Brain, Marseille, France, June 2022; Center for Research on Animal Cognition, Toulouse, France, June 2022).

As announced in the project proposal, a final workshop has been organized to gather researchers interested in the project's topic. The 3-day, highly interdisciplinary event, called "From Associations to Cognition" was held in Marseille in July 2022, and gathered about 50 persons, including international speakers (Mexico, UK, USA). We managed to bring together experts and students from the fields of experimental psychology, modelling, linguistics, neurosciences, animal behavior and child development. It has been a great success and a friendly event, as well as an occasion to adequately disseminate the project's results through two oral presentations and one poster presentation.

A further event that was organized was a 3-day scientific retreat in Southern France for our Comparative Cognition team (20 people), in 2020 (cancelled) and 2021).

Next to these core scientific activities, communication actions towards the general public have been engaged - though the plans were greatly disturbed by the Covid situation. After several events had to be cancelled, finally oral presentations were possible on two occasions: as a general scientific knowledge talk in front of the 2020 class of civil engineers at ENTPE in Lyon, France (a reknown French college for civil engineering - about 100 students) and in front of a lay audience in my hometown Rodez, France, within Rodez' "Free TIme University" (about 100 persons).

List of publications :

Chartier, T. F., & Fagot, J. (2022). Simultaneous learning of directional and non-directional stimulus relations in baboons (Papio papio). Learning & Behavior, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-022-00522-8
Chartier, T. F., & Fagot, J. (2022). Associative symmetry: a divide between humans and nonhumans?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(26), 286-289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.01.009
Chartier, T. F., & Dautriche, I. (submitted). Do backward associations have anything to say about language?
Chartier, T. F., Tosatto, L. & Fagot, J. (in prep) Intersubject variability on bidirectional associations tasks in baboons and humans
Chartier, T. F., Dahmani, L., Sabatier, M., Rey, A., L. & Fagot, J. (in prep) Unsuspected variability and task-dependency in a purported hallmark of human cognition
Chartier, T. F., Rey, A., Tosatto, L. & Fagot, J. (in prep) Resolving the contradictions of unidirectiona lstimulus associations

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

A major contribution of the project is the reassessment of a long-held assumption in the field of cognitive sciences: humans would cognitively differ from non-humans in the so-called "associative symmetry" capacity, which would confer humans their proficiency in forming interchangeability relations between the words and the objects/actions they refer to. Empirical, bibliographical and theoretical contributions have allowed to cast doubt on the reality of this dogma, and propose alternative theoretical points of view to reconcile data and theory.

A wider implication of our work is that this proposition, which we are further developping, has the potential to reconcile 2 major historical schools of psychology, Behaviorism & Cognitivism, that have been opposed since the late 1950s and the Skinner/Chomsky famous dispute. This was also the motivation behind our final workshop, that aimed at bridging the gap between associations (behaviorism) and cognition (cognitivism).

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