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Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way
Lucas123 writes "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"
So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
....done by monkies.
And I bet if they tried other animals they would find the same thing.
However there are some in the computer industry that have yet to grasp that in providing the users with the ability to be interactive..
I just haven't figured out what kind of creature doesn't understand the natural doing feedback loop in learning.
That little guy has been keeping us dumb(and annoyed) for years.
if you poke the right buttons on the computer thing, the big man in the suit gives you a treat.
in reality humans are advanced monkeys...
This has been well established for decades across a wide variety of species. The result is entirely unsurprising. The only way this would have been newsworthy would be if the result had been the exact opposite.
We'll have an infinite number of seasons!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"Monkey See Monkey Do" produced by ABC and watched by fifty million apes :)
Side note: I am NOT stereotyping monkeys as being apes by the way.
We are advanced primates. We are great apes, not monkeys. And, I'm not completely sure about the advanced part, either... ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row." Primates using an ATM? That's monkey business!
Even if the rest of the methodology is sound (and based on the description in TFA, I'm skeptical), an experiment two subjects is not sufficient for their conclusions. With only two subjects, any conclusion is suspect.
monkey do"
with enough time, all nuggets of conventional wisdom will be verified scientifically
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
SuperMemo is an interesting software package that helps with memorization and even "reading thousands of web pages at once." Seriously. To my memory, the story goes something like this: Piotr Wozniak was studying molecular biology in Poland and realized that the amount of information he had to consume was way above the limits of what he was going to achieve with the methods he was using to study. Mainly concerned about his uptake of tens of thousands of English words, he began tracking his own memory, recall, experiences, etc. and devised his own spaced repetition algorithm which is now encoded into the freely available software on the site (well, not all of it is free).
Me, well. I prefer to "read 'thousands' of web pages at once" via Opera but the literal bookmarking, highlighting and the ability to fork pages into the equivalent of flash cards is quite interesting.
* Memorizing vocabulary
* Another post
* One here and here re: learning a language in the digital age.
This story has been brought to you by monkeys, and the letter 18.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I don't see what use this could have.
I mean, sure they might have found a way to get monkeys to learn things, but do they really expect to apply that research to teenagers?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
...If you're going to get political, lets not resort to name calling. Facts, my Young Sebastian*, convey a much more effective message.
Seems like a good time to bring back this old news-
Macaca/Macaque slip by Sen. George Allen (R-Virginia).
--
*I have NEVER seen this meme, only heard of it on Wikipedia.
I'm not surprised that primates (and us) learn better when actively engaged in the material. I've always gotten far more out of classes in which the instructor forced the class to be engaged in the material/lesson than ones where a human tranquilizer of an instructor would bore us to sleep.
Hot!
"Hey, idea, Jimbo: let's pretend not to get it when they give us the 'hints' tomorrow
licet differant, aequabitur
I don't have a Monkey ancestor !!!! I evolved directly from the fishes.
If you want proof, go to school almost anywhere in America.
Anyway, educators have always known that learners have to be actively involved in learning. Consider the Socratic method for instance. Students are actively involved in defending their arguments in the face of the teacher's questions. Nobody has ever asserted that students learn by osmosis but that's the way most teachers behave.
Monkey neurology isn't all that different from that of humans. The difference is that humans deal with symbols more naturally than other animals. In that respect, it isn't that surprising that monkeys learn the same. Just like human students, monkeys learn best when they have to think about what they are learning. Lectures, to monkeys and students (sometimes there is a lot of similarity) just don't work that well.
Yeah, completely unintuitive that monkeys remember better when they have to memorize the thing they're supposed to remember. The only thing that is unintuitive is that someone let you play with monkeys.
It makes sense that a study on how to teach monkeys would come out of UCLA, because I can really see it having some practical applications for the students there.
(Yes, I went to USC.)
It explains a lot about the office.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/
Nate Kornell, Herbert S. Terrace
ABSTRACT--How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.
... we both actively use mirror nuerons in learning?
"I just haven't figured out what kind of creature doesn't understand the natural doing feedback loop in learning." Probably only really simple organisms like viruses, bacteria, coral, jelly fish and molusks.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
No monkeys are left behind.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
"In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water.
And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live.
So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands, and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog.
And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey, and that made YOU!
So there you go! You're the retarded offspring of 5 monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel! Congratulations!"
We and our fellow apes are related to the other primates; Wikipedia says that there's some disagreement over whether primates are descended from Plesiadapiformes or just related do them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Father Monkey: Son. That poo won't throw itself...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy!
Is Curious George anything like, say, Nookuhler George? Or Military Misadventure George? Or Read His Lips George, Sr.?
Or the companion Suck Me Off Bill? (complete with Monica Missles!)
Collect them all!
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
If we know primates are very similar to humans, when will we stop locking them in captivity and poking and prodding them for our narrow gains? I'm saddened that UCLA does useless research on primates.
Monkeys also crap just like humans do! The only difference of course being that afterwards they throw it.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
The summary claims that the monkeys learned to correctly "put up to 18 photos...in a row." However, TFA states that the two rhesus macaques "learned to place five photographs in a particular order" and that "In all, each monkey learned to order at least 18 separate series of photographs". I won't make any claims as to which task is easier, but I wanted to clear up that particular point for those few who skip straight to the comments.
Snowclone is the new clich
Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way
Monkeys read Slashdot?!?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Finally an explanation to the Steve Ballmer monkey dance. I was really wondering about that one.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...what would you do if you held a flame war but no one came? Only 62 posts all day. Surely this featured on the front page was supposed to elicit hundreds of "evolution is fact", "no it isn't", "yes it is" back-and-forths. Predictably, a couple of commenters even dragged Dubya and Republicans into the "discussion", and still no sparks. As unlikely as it may have seemed, I think even the masses of dullards here might be starting to catch on to what's going on, that they're being played. If we just stop taking the bait every time, maybe we'll start getting a more interesting selection of stories.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Parent must be mathematician. The joke is insider.
Don't know if it is good taste to spell it out like this, but I would like to see more jokes like this in slashdot.
Hmmm looking at president Bush you dont need to look long to guess which one of two he is.
But I would point out that the kind of research that was done in this case is most often done on humans.
You raise an interesting point. Most Slashdotters would have not much difficulty in accepting that an intelligent machine, if it were sufficiently similar to us in mental capacities, might be for ethical purposes a person. What about animals then? We know that some animals are human. How close to human does an animal have to be to become, ethically speaking, a person?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, that's pretty insightful. Which is better: learning something, or learning what you've been learning?
I hadn't heard about the Plesiadapiformes before. Unfortunately, after reading that article, I find that I still know almost nothing about them (except for what you said in your one sentence summary).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Those who run schools which don't assign homework, perhaps?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Well I'll be a Monkeys Uncle. This is news is bannanas.
Reminds of two old sayings:
If you really want to understand something, try explaining it to someone else.
Tell me, and I will forget...
Show me, and I may remember...
Involve me, and I will understand.
Poops in hand...
Flings it at you...
Grins and applauds.
"that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved"
Yeah...and so do dogs. They learn tricks faster when they're involved rather than just watching another dog do it.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
As others have pointed out, the n you should be looking at in this situation is not the number of monkeys, but the number of times they run the learning experiment; remember, what you're looking for in Science is repeatable results. So, the task of this experiment is to see if a given monkey will show repeatable results with the experiment they've defined. We have already done many experiments (or, more precisely, taken many observations) that lead us to suspect that more most intents and purposes one Rhesus Macaque is similar to the next. We need not test all Rhesus Macaques, only follow up on discrepancies in the data set if it arises. Sometimes more monkeys is useful for that, generally not though.
[Ego]out
And MBAs, most venture capitalists, and half of marketing.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
... do they go on-line, find some p0rn and spank the human?
Have gnu, will travel.
To exceed the critical mass, it would most definately be necessary to lure females to this site.
And trust me, that is not very likely.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling