Calculating Monkeys
The capital city, Baghdad, is in the center-east. Iraq's rich history dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is identified as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing and arithmetic. This of course assumes that humans were the first to learn to calculate but a recent study shows that Rhesus monkeys turn out to be pretty good statisticians.
They can accurately assess which of two behaviors is more likely to bring them a reward by summing together a series of probabilistic clues. Tianming Yang and Michael Shadlen at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, US, tested the reasoning of two rhesus macaques by encouraging them to observe a series of abstract shapes on a video screen.
Each shape corresponded to a different probability that a drink reward would be associated with a red instead of a green target.
In each trial, the monkey saw a sequence of 4 of 10 possible shapes then, had to choose which target to look at. The probability that the red target would give the reward was the sum of the probabilities for each of the four shapes; otherwise, the green target yielded the drink. I start to wonder if they might have more chance identifying shapes than some of the less gifted members of a Visio class I taught recently.
After several weeks of training on thousands of trials per day - clearly, the monkeys are no Einstein’s - both macaques learned to match their choices closely to the actual probabilities revealed by the shapes they saw, choosing the correct target more than 75% of the time.
Further studies show that Monkeys can also do calculations involving plus and minus which is more than can be said for all the attendees of my spreadsheet class even after their Excel training course.
It might still be some time before a monkey becomes a blackjack card counter but it might be time to stop experimenting on them.
They can accurately assess which of two behaviors is more likely to bring them a reward by summing together a series of probabilistic clues. Tianming Yang and Michael Shadlen at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, US, tested the reasoning of two rhesus macaques by encouraging them to observe a series of abstract shapes on a video screen.
Each shape corresponded to a different probability that a drink reward would be associated with a red instead of a green target.
In each trial, the monkey saw a sequence of 4 of 10 possible shapes then, had to choose which target to look at. The probability that the red target would give the reward was the sum of the probabilities for each of the four shapes; otherwise, the green target yielded the drink. I start to wonder if they might have more chance identifying shapes than some of the less gifted members of a Visio class I taught recently.
After several weeks of training on thousands of trials per day - clearly, the monkeys are no Einstein’s - both macaques learned to match their choices closely to the actual probabilities revealed by the shapes they saw, choosing the correct target more than 75% of the time.
Further studies show that Monkeys can also do calculations involving plus and minus which is more than can be said for all the attendees of my spreadsheet class even after their Excel training course.
It might still be some time before a monkey becomes a blackjack card counter but it might be time to stop experimenting on them.
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