{"id":4871,"date":"2012-04-13T11:54:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T01:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/?p=4871"},"modified":"2012-04-24T12:55:23","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T02:55:23","slug":"baboons-can-recognise-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/nature\/animals\/baboons-can-recognise-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Baboons can recognise words"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mceTemp mceIEcenter\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Baboons have no linguistic skills, but they can spot printed words.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Over a period of 45 days, a team of scientists from the US and France studied a group of baboons living in a fenced-in area. The area had several computers with touch-sensitive screens and the baboons could use them whenever they wanted.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The screens displayed a four-letter sequence and the baboons had to tap on one of two shapes on the screen, depending on whether it was a real word or nonsense. If the animal gave the correct answer, it received a food treat. After the experiment, the primates learnt to discriminate dozens of English words from more than 7,000 non-words with nearly 75 per cent accuracy.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">These results suggest that one of the most complex human skills \u2014 orthographic processing, the ability to recognize words as combination of objects that appear in a certain way \u2014 could be more common in the primate brain than previously thought.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Source:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/eurekalert.org\">Eureka<\/a><\/p>\n<dl id=\"attachment_4873\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"width: 573px;\">\n<dt class=\"wp-caption-dt\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4873 alignleft\" title=\"SONY DSC\" src=\"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/baboon.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"563\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/baboon.jpg 563w, https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/baboon-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/baboon-250x166.jpg 250w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 563px) 100vw, 563px\" \/><\/dt>\n<dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">A baboon from the study of Dr Grainger and colleagues. Image: J. Fagot<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Baboons have no linguistic skills, but they can spot printed words. Over a period of 45 days, a team of scientists from the US and France studied a group of baboons living in&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,10],"tags":[215,216,848,205],"class_list":["post-4871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animals","category-science","category-video","tag-linguistics","tag-monkeys","tag-news","tag-video-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4871"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4930,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4871\/revisions\/4930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}