804 research outputs found
Chimpanzee material culture: implications for human evolution
The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Pongidae) among all other living species, is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor less than five million years
ago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools. Of the primates, and even of the other Great Apes, they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users.
Chimpanzees meet the criteria of working definitions of culture as originally devised for human beings in socio-cultural anthropology. They show sex differences in
using tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees and
human societies living by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow, at least for food-getting. Different communities of chimpanzees have different tool-kits, and not
all of this regional and local variation can be explained by the varied physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely customs based on
non-functionally derived and symbolically encoded traditions. Chimpanzees serve as heuristic, referential models for the reconstruction of cultural evolution in apes
and humans from an ancestral hominoid. However, chimpanzees are not humans, and key differences exist between them, though many of these apparent contrasts remain to be
explored empirically and theoretically
Developmental Bootstrapping of AIs
Although some current AIs surpass human abilities in closed artificial worlds
such as board games, their abilities in the real world are limited. They make
strange mistakes and do not notice them. They cannot be instructed easily, fail
to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They do not make good collaborators.
Mainstream approaches for creating AIs are the traditional manually-constructed
symbolic AI approach and generative and deep learning AI approaches including
large language models (LLMs). These systems are not well suited for creating
robust and trustworthy AIs. Although it is outside of the mainstream, the
developmental bootstrapping approach has more potential. In developmental
bootstrapping, AIs develop competences like human children do. They start with
innate competences. They interact with the environment and learn from their
interactions. They incrementally extend their innate competences with
self-developed competences. They interact and learn from people and establish
perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. They acquire the competences they
need through bootstrapping. However, developmental robotics has not yet
produced AIs with robust adult-level competences. Projects have typically
stopped at the Toddler Barrier corresponding to human infant development at
about two years of age, before their speech is fluent. They also do not bridge
the Reading Barrier, to skillfully and skeptically draw on the socially
developed information resources that power current LLMs. The next competences
in human cognitive development involve intrinsic motivation, imitation
learning, imagination, coordination, and communication. This position paper
lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice
of developmental bootstrapping to acquire further competences and create
robust, resilient, and human-compatible AIs.Comment: 102 pages, 29 figure
Anthropology 2018 APR Self-Study & Documents
UNM Anthropology APR self-study and review team report for Fall 2018, fulfilling requirements of the Higher Learning Commission
Improving the Social Communication Competence of Augmentative and Alternative Communication Users
A repeated measures design was used to investigate the effect of group intervention on the teaching of partner-focused questions to people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), and the perceived communicative competence before and after intervention of the AAC users. Six participants who had severe speech impairments participated in the study. They ranged in age from 18 to 49 years, had a developmental disability with the absence of a social disability, and used a range of AAC systems. The intervention sessions were conducted in a dyad format with two AAC users, and were conducted in one-hour sessions over four consecutive weeks. Four out of the six participants increased the number of partner-focused questions used from pre-intervention to post-intervention. Members of the general public, blind to the goal of this study, judged the majority of the participants to be more communicatively competent after intervention
Washington University Record, February 24, 2006
https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/2063/thumbnail.jp
The linguistic repertoire and the learning of English as a foreign language : a case study of high school monolingual and bilingual students in Aleppo City, Syria.
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D172310 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
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