Hysteresis in motor and language production.

Hysteresis in motor planning and syntactic priming in language planning refer to the influence of prior production history on current production behaviour. Computational efficiency accounts of action hysteresis and theoretical accounts of syntactic priming both argue that reusing an existing plan is less costly than generating a novel plan. Despite these similarities across motor and language frameworks, research on planning in these domains has largely been conducted independently. The current study adapted an existing language paradigm to mirror the incremental nature of a manual motor task to investigate the presence of parallel hysteresis effects across domains. We observed asymmetries in production choice for both the motor and language tasks that resulted from the influence of prior history. Furthermore, these hysteresis effects were more exaggerated for subordinate production forms implicating an inverse preference effect that spanned domain. Consistent with computational efficiency accounts, across both task participants exhibited reaction time savings on trials in which they reused a recent production choice. Together, these findings lend support to the broader notion that there are common production biases that span both motor and language domains.

Consistent second-order motor planning by cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus): Evidence from a dowel task.

One of the hallmarks of complex motor planning in humans involves grasping objects in preparation for future actions, termed second-order motor planning. This ability has an extended developmental trajectory in humans and is also shared with nonhuman primates. Here, we presented seven cotton-top tamarins with a dowel task that has prompted variable grasping behaviors for some primate species. Tamarins could use either an efficient grasp to bring food stuck onto the end of a dowel to their mouth (radial grasp) or an inefficient grasp that required repositioning (ulnar grasp). The tamarins were very consistent in their use of radial grasps. These data support the morphological constraint theory suggesting that species with limited dexterity (inability to perform precision grasps) may demonstrate more consistent second-order motor planning due to the increased cost of inefficient grasping postures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo.

Humans share the ability to intuitively map 'sharp' or 'round' pseudowords, such as 'bouba' versus 'kiki', to abstract edgy versus round shapes, respectively. This effect, known as sound symbolism, appears early in human development. The phylogenetic origin of this phenomenon, however, is unclear: are humans the only species capable of experiencing correspondences between speech sounds and shapes, or could similar effects be observed in other animals? Thus far, evidence from an implicit matching experiment failed to find evidence of this sound symbolic matching in great apes, suggesting its human uniqueness. However, explicit tests of sound symbolism have never been conducted with nonhuman great apes. In the present study, a language-competent bonobo completed a cross-modal matching-to-sample task in which he was asked to match spoken English words to pictures, as well as 'sharp' or 'round' pseudowords to shapes. Sound symbolic trials were interspersed among English words. The bonobo matched English words to pictures with high accuracy, but did not show any evidence of spontaneous sound symbolic matching. Our results suggest that speech exposure/comprehension alone cannot explain sound symbolism. This lends plausibility to the hypothesis that biological differences between human and nonhuman primates could account for the putative human specificity of this effect.

Trace conditioning as a test for animal consciousness: a new approach.

Trace conditioning involves the pairing of a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), followed by a short interval with a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Recently, trace conditioning has been proposed as a test for animal consciousness due to its correlation in humans with subjective report of the CS-UCS connection. We argue that the distractor task in the Clark and Squire (1998) study on trace conditioning has been overlooked. Attentional inhibition played a crucial role in disrupting trace conditioning and awareness of the CS-UCS contingency in the human participants of that study. These results may be understood within the framework of the Temporal Representation Theory that asserts consciousness serves the function of selecting information into a representation of the present moment. While neither sufficient nor necessary, attentional processes are the primary means to select stimuli for consciousness. Consciousness and attention are both needed by an animal capable of flexible behavioral response. Consciousness keeps track of the current situation; attention amplifies task-relevant stimuli and inhibits irrelevant stimuli. In light of these joint functions, we hypothesize that the failure to trace condition under distraction in an organism known to successfully trace condition otherwise can be one of several tests that indicates animal consciousness. Successful trace conditioning is widespread and by itself does not indicate consciousness.

Fishnition: Developing Models From Cognition Toward Consciousness.

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic view attributes consciousness broadly to any behavior that involves sensory responsiveness. Yet human experience and observation of diverse species suggest that the most plausible case is that consciousness functions between these poles. In exploring the middle ground, we discuss the pros and cons of "high level" approaches such as the dual systems approach. According to this model, System 1 can be thought of as unconscious; processing is fast, automatic, associative, heuristic, parallel, contextual, and likely to be conserved across species. Consciousness is associated with System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, rule-based, serial, abstract, and exclusively human. An advantage of this model is the clear contrast between heuristic and decision-based responses, but it fails to include contextual decision-making in novel conditions which falls in between these two categories. We also review a "low level" model involving trace conditioning, which is a trained response to the first of two paired stimuli separated by an interval. This model highlights the role of consciousness in maintaining a stimulus representation over a temporal span, though it overlooks the importance of attention in subserving and also disrupting trace conditioning in humans. Through a critical analysis of these two extremes, we will develop the case for flexible behavioral response to the stimulus environment as the best model for demonstrating animal consciousness. We discuss a methodology for gauging flexibility across a wide variety of species and offer a case study in spatial navigation to illustrate our proposal. Flexibility serves the evolutionary function of enabling the complex evaluation of changing conditions, where motivation is the basis for goal valuation, and attention selects task-relevant stimuli to aid decision-making processes. We situate this evolutionary function within the Temporal Representation Theory of consciousness, which proposes that consciousness represents the present moment in order to facilitate flexible action.