Publications by authors named "Ken Schweller"
Article Synopsis
- Animals, including nonhuman primates, use spatial navigation to find resources like food and shelter, but studying this in natural settings is challenging due to uncontrolled variables.
- Researchers tested six chimpanzees in a virtual reality environment where they interacted with a touch screen, mimicking real-life navigation behaviors by learning to find landmarks associated with food.
- This study suggests that virtual reality can effectively combine the ecological validity of field research with the control of laboratory settings, potentially advancing understanding of primate navigation strategies such as landmarks and spatial mapping.
Humans share the ability to intuitively map 'sharp' or 'round' pseudowords, such as 'bouba' versus 'kiki', to abstract edgy versus round shapes, respectively. This effect, known as sound symbolism, appears early in human development. The phylogenetic origin of this phenomenon, however, is unclear: are humans the only species capable of experiencing correspondences between speech sounds and shapes, or could similar effects be observed in other animals? Thus far, evidence from an matching experiment failed to find evidence of this sound symbolic matching in great apes, suggesting its human uniqueness.
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