Abstract
Sensitivity to dependencies (correspondences between distant items) in sensory stimuli plays a crucial role in human music and language. Here, we show that squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) can detect abstract, non-adjacent dependencies in auditory stimuli. Monkeys discriminated between tone sequences containing a dependency and those lacking it, and generalized to previously unheard pitch classes and novel dependency distances. This constitutes the first pattern learning study where artificial stimuli were designed with the species' communication system in mind. These results suggest that the ability to recognize dependencies represents a capability that had already evolved in humans’ last common ancestor with squirrel monkeys, and perhaps before.
Highlights
Human language relies on several basic and indispensable cognitive skills, including the detection of relationships or ‘dependencies’ between stimuli that are non-contiguous in space or time
Test 1 investigated whether squirrel monkeys (i) acquired the dependency rule, showing different reactions between stimuli obeying or violating it, (ii) generalized the rule over new instantiations of sound patterns and (iii) generalized to dependencies between low sounds separated by a previously unheard number of intervening high sounds
Test 1 showed that our subjects effectively generalized the specific pattern beyond specific pitches or stimulus lengths
Summary
Human language relies on several basic and indispensable cognitive skills, including the detection of relationships or ‘dependencies’ between stimuli that are non-contiguous in space or time. Detection of abstract dependencies at arbitrary variable distances (crucially beyond one intervening element, already shown in [4,7]) has never been demonstrated before in a non-human animal (though see [8] for initial hints). The current study tested the hypothesis that a non-human primate species could detect abstract, non-adjacent dependencies in acoustic stimuli, even when dependencies occurred over an arbitrary variable number of intervening sounds.
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