Production of Supra-regular Spatial Sequences by Macaque Monkeys.

ABSTRACT: Understanding and producing embedded sequences in language, music, or mathematics, is a central characteristic of our species. These domains are hypothesized to involve a human-specific competence for supra-regular grammars, which can generate embedded sequences that go beyond the regular sequences engendered by finite-state automata. However, is this capacity truly unique to humans? Using a production task, we show that macaque monkeys can be trained to produce time-symmetrical embedded spatial sequences whose formal description requires supra-regular grammars or, equivalently, a push-down stack automaton. Monkeys spontaneously generalized the learned grammar to novel sequences, including longer ones, and could generate hierarchical sequences formed by an embedding of two levels of abstra

SUBMITTER: Jiang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6606444 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature