Neuroscientists call it cross-modal association and, for a long time, assumed that humans were the only creatures able to make such associations. In this new effort, the researchers found that macaques make such associations, suggesting there may be many other animals with the ability.

The work involved playing spoken human words or vocalizations by monkeys to several individual macaques. After each sound was played, the macaque was shown a picture of the item mentioned by the human voice, an apple, for example.

After repeating the exercise several times with several macaques, allowing them to make an association between the sound spoken and the image that was displayed, the researchers played the same words or vocalizations by a different person or monkey to see if the macaques responded to them in the same ways.

The researchers found that the macaques did respond in much the same ways, suggesting they had made associations between the picture of the object and the actual meaning behind the word, and not the way it sounded.

  • IninewCrow
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    211 days ago

    I wouldn’t be surprised, I read about US politicians that do that every day and still have a high failure rate.