A recent report of one-trial learning in a group of saddle-back tamarins (Saguinus fuscicollis) conflicted with views of learning set formation based on traditional techniques employing isolated subjects. An experiment is reported in which a group of Guinea baboons (Papio papio) was given a series of discrimination and habit reversal tasks. Both one-trial learning and learning set formation occurred. Analysis of spatial behavior revealed that the group learned in a single trial to discriminate stocked from unstocked zones. Improvement in successes (reinforced "digging") was progressive but not rapid, indicating learning set formation. It appears that outcomes depend on the behavioral variables chosen.

Studying language in its natural context is one of the new challenges for natural language processing as well as linguistics in general. Much work have been done in the perspective of spoken language processing, even though the issues in this domain remains largely unsolved (disfluencies, ill-formedness, etc.). But the problem becomes even harder when trying to take into account all the aspects of natural communication, including pragmatics and gestures. In this case, we need to describe many different sources of information (let's call them linguistic domains) coming from the signal (prosody, phonetics), the transcription (morphology, syntax, lexical semantics), as well as the behavior of the conversation partners (gestures, attitudes, etc), the contextual background, etc. Taking into account such a rich environment means that language is seen in its multimodal dimension which necessitates a full description of each verbal or non-verbal domain as well as their interaction. Such a description is obviously a pre-requisite before the elaboration of a multimodal theory of language. It is also a basis for the development of parsing tools or annotating devices. Both goals rely on the availability of annotated resources, providing information on all the different domains and modalities. This is the goal of the project described here, that led to the development of a large annotated multimodal corpus called CID (Corpus of Interactional Data).In this article, the context of multimodality and the issues we are faced with when building multimodal resources will first be presented. The second part, we will present more precisely the organization of the project during which the CID corpus was built. The rest of the paper will describe the solutions we propose to what we consider as the main issues for multimodal annotation, namely the annotation scheme, the alignment between the different domains and the interoperability of the different sources of information. Multimodal Interaction and its AnnotationOur work aims at collecting data in natural situations, with audio and video recordings of human interaction, focusing then on language and gestures, to the exclusion of the other kinds of modalities be they natural (smell, touch) or artificial (related to human-machine interaction for example). More specifically, what we are interested in when studying such domains is the interaction that exists between the different sources of information. Indeed, we think that (1) meaning comes from the interplay of different dimensions such as prosody, lexicon, gestures,

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Environmental preference of male rats reared during 2 months after weaning either in a complex and changing environment (EC) or in empty laboratory cages (SC) was assessed in 4 different experiments. For 2 weeks after differential rearing, rats were placed in groups of 6 in testing cages which were divided into 2 compartments with communicating holes. One of these compartments was empty; the other contained 6 objects (complex compartment). Daily, 3 objects were moved from 1 compartment to the other and replaced by new ones. The preference for any of the compartments was chiefly assessed by the localization of feces (Experiments I and II) and directly by the localization of the animals through videorecording (Experiments III and IV). Both EC and SC rats showed a significant preference for the empty compartment during both light and dark portions of the daily cycle, but particularly during the light portion.Moreover, EC and SC animals differed from one another in that the SC rats showed a stronger preferences for the empty compartment than the EC rats, especially when active. General preference for the empty compartment seemed to diminish slowly, but EC and SC rats tended to remain distinct in habitat selection, at least during the period tested. This behavioral difference, tentatively interpreted in terms of neophobia, might constitute a possible mechanism for automaintenance of differential rearing effects.