I recently heard a story on NPR about the testing of words with baboons. The scientists weren't testing the animals to see if they could understand the words, but to see if they could comprehend whether something was a real word or not. They placed a touch screen in a room which if the baboon selected correctly the baboon would get a treat. The baboons were allowed to go into the room freely, whenever they wanted.
To the scientists' surprise, after some practice, the baboons were able to discern the difference between English words and nonsense words. For instance there could have been the word PERSON and the non-word POUEIRSEIKN. The baboons were able to figure out the non-word used too many vowels and had awkward consonant placement. Most of the baboons were able to figure out over 4,000 English words and one special baboon was able to correctly select over 11,000.
The results of this experiment indicate once the rules of English letter placement are learned, real words can be separated from unreal words. This has nothing to do with actually understanding the meaning of the words, but everything to do with pattern recognition. The baboons weren't learning English, they were simply learning how some symbols do not get placed next to other symbols in certain series.
This also means young children are probably doing the same thing. Pattern recognition and solving is in a very different area of the brain from language learning. Understanding this may lead to different approaches in teaching English in schools.
Recently 60 Minutes had a story on a very specialized form of Aphasia in which people cannot recognize faces at all. A young boy cannot pick his own mother out of a line up of faces. He must rely on other clues to guide him to her such as her voice, mannerisms, hair, dress, and of course other people pointing to her and declaring the face belongs to his mother. Conversely the episode also highlighted some people who are called "super recognizers", who can recognize every face they've ever seen. A woman from NYC could readily pick out faces from people she may have only seen once, ten years ago. She could also easily pick out faces of famous people when they were just children because age doesn't seem to affect her ability.
These two stories seem to share a link. It makes me wonder if the young boy who could not discern faces, may not be able to readily pick out certain patterns. Humans have an innate ability to see faces where faces are not, such as the face on Mars, or in the Moon, or Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich. Growing up we had a bathroom flooring material that was made up of "broken" shapes. I could pretty much find a human face in every one of the little shapes if I looked long enough. This is just pattern recognition. Could the young boy pick out faces in our bathroom flooring too, or would he by stymied?
We tend to think of our brains as immensely complex. We have historically tried to keep ourselves elevated far above our animal brethren with our special computational abilities. However, experiments like the one above only go to show how many of our special functions are actually common. We now have computer programs that can recognize faces. Is it simply a combination of all these separate talents that truly makes human beings exceptional?
