What do animal signals mean?

Rendall, Drew; Owren, Michael J.; Ryan, Michael J.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.06.007

Cited by 348 publications

(314 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Animal observation studies (e.g. Rendall, Owren & Ryan, 2009) have shown that primates and other species emit shrill and staccato (strident) sounds at moments of high arousal and aggression, and smoother, legato sounds (sonorant) in positive social situations such as grooming or foraging. The assumption here is that strident sounds are associated with spiky shapes and sonorant ones with smooth shapes, reflecting the auditory pattern of spectral density and attack.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the “Bouba–Kiki” effect

2014

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the “Bouba–Kiki” effect

2014

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“…Although this could be considered as a commonality between all approaches, a critical analysis of research findings and theoretical developments in ethology suggest that the principles that are applied to the study of human language should not necessarily apply to the study of animal signals (Rendall, Owren, & Ryan, 2009) or to some aspects of human nonverbal behaviour (Owren & Bachorowski, 2003 Keltner, 1995), without specifying what they mean by the terms indicator, sign, signal, or display. We assume that this lack of specificity implies that these authors endorse a general dictionary definition of the word, their goal being to study the eliciting circumstances and information content of particular behaviour patterns rather than to develop different concepts for nonverbal communication.…”

Section: Information (Mathematics)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Signal Processing: The Research Agenda

Pantić

Cowie

D’Errico

et al. 2011

Visual Analysis of Humans

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Abstract. The exploration of how we react to the world and interact with it and each other remains one of the greatest scientific challenges. Latest research trends in cognitive sciences argue that our common view of intelligence is too narrow, ignoring a crucial range of abilities that matter immensely for how people do in life. This range of abilities is called social intelligence and includes the ability to express and recognise social signals produced during social interactions like agreement, politeness, empathy, friendliness, conflict, etc., coupled with the ability to manage them in order to get along well with others while winning their cooperation. Social Signal Processing (SSP) is the new research domain that aims at understanding and modelling social interactions (human-science goals), and at providing computers with similar abilities in human-computer interaction scenarios (technological goals). SSP is in its infancy, and the journey towards artificial social intelligence and socially-aware computing is still long. This research agenda is a twofold, a discussion about how the field is understood by people who are currently active in it and a discussion about issues that the researchers in this formative field face.

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“…According to this view, what matters for a signal to evolve is to have a positive impact on the signaller's fitness, irrespective of whether the perceiver benefits by acquiring some information. In a recent essay on the meaning of animal signals, Rendall et al (2009) emphasized the weaknesses of an approach based on the transfer of information between a sender and a receiver to explain animal communication. They contend that information is too vaguely defined as a concept to constitute the central aspect of signalling.…”

Section: What Is a Social Signal?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 Ethologists indeed recognize that language has its own rules that are separate from those governing animal signals (Rendall et al 2009). However, the importance of multimodal communication makes it difficult to approach the study of social signals without considering language and its complex interactions with nonverbal behaviour.…”

Section: What Is a Social Signal?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A psycho-ethological approach to social signal processing

Méhu

Scherer

2012

Cogn Process

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The emerging field of social signal processing can benefit from a theoretical framework to guide future research activities. The present article aims at drawing attention to two areas of research that devoted considerable efforts to the understanding of social behaviour: ethology and social psychology. With a long tradition in the study of animal signals, ethology and evolutionary biology have developed theoretical concepts to account for the functional significance of signalling. For example, the consideration of divergent selective pressures responsible for the evolution of signalling and social cognition emphasized the importance of two classes of indicators: informative cues and communicative signals. Social psychology, on the other hand, investigates emotional expression and interpersonal relationships, with a focus on the mechanisms underlying the production and interpretation of social signals and cues. Based on the theoretical considerations developed in these two fields, we propose a model that integrates the processing of perceivable individual features (social signals and cues) with contextual information, and we suggest that output of computer-based processing systems should be derived in terms of functional significance rather than in terms of absolute conceptual meaning.

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What do animal signals mean?

Cited by 348 publications

References 73 publications

Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the “Bouba–Kiki” effect

Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the “Bouba–Kiki” effect

Social Signal Processing: The Research Agenda

A psycho-ethological approach to social signal processing

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