Scienceblogtwo

A first look at how the canine mind reconstructs what it sees has been provided by scientists' decoding of visual pictures from a dog's brain. The study conducted at Emory University was published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments. The findings imply that dogs are more tuned into environmental actions than they are to the person or thing performing the deed. Three 30-minute sessions totaling 90 minutes were used to collect the fMRI brain data from two awake, unrestrained dogs as they viewed videos. They next examined the patterns in the brain data using a machine-learning system. According to Gregory Berns, an Emory professor of psychology and the paper's corresponding author, "We demonstrated that we can track the activity in a dog's brain while it is watching a movie and, to at least a limited extent, reconstruct what it is looking at." "It's incredible that we can get that off," Recent developments in fMRI and machine learning to decode...

Researchers from the University of Vienna studied the cries of Asian elephants using an acoustic camera that shows sound pressure. Elephants rarely used their mouths alone to create their low frequency "rumbles," preferring instead to use their trunk or their mouth and trunk together. This is the first study to unequivocally show that a non-human animal can emit calls using both its mouth and its nose. The study was just released in the publication "Animals." The world's longest nasal elongation is found in elephants. Unsurprisingly, when they release their low-frequency, partially infrasonic rumbles via the lengthy trunk, they resound even deeper. Veronika Beeck and Angela Stoeger's team of cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna have recently demonstrated that these vocal tract resonances, commonly known as a nasal pronunciation in human language, are essential for animal communication. The researchers hypothesize that Asian elephants may be abl...