Tag: Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

  • Campus & Community

    Monkey see, monkey infer

    Monkeys keep turning out to be smarter than people think they are. Researchers have shown that they can count to four and are aware of differences between languages like Dutch and Japanese, even though they don’t known what is being said. Now, Harvard psychologists find that monkeys can draw correct conclusions about novel situations. For…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Monkeys unable to master grammar crucial to human language

    Grammar is essentially a system of rules for taking a finite set of discrete elements and combining them into a limitless range of novel expressions. For humans, grammar cobbles together words to create sentences. There is no evidence that animals have a similar system to produce sequences of calls with more expressive meaning. Together with…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Researchers debate origin of language

    Birds sing, chimps grunt, and whales whistle, but those sounds fall far short of expressing the richness of their experiences. Their lack of language goes to the question of why humans have it but no other animals do. That question in turn leads to two major theories of the origin of language. One is the…

    1–2 minutes