Research verifies a Neandertal's right-handedness, hinting at language capacity

Scratch marks on the teeth from the Neandertal skeleton Regourdou.

(Phys.org)—There are precious few Neanderthal skeletons available to science. One of the more complete was discovered in 1957 in France, roughly 900 yards away from the famous Lascaux Cave. That skeleton was dubbed "Regourdou." Then, about two decades ago, researchers examined Regourdou's arm bones and theorized that he had been right-handed.

"This skeleton had a mandible and parts of the skeleton below the neck," said David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas. "Twenty-plus years ago, some people studied the skeleton and argued that it was a right-handed individual based on the muscularity of the right arm versus the left arm."

Handedness, a uniquely human trait, signals brain lateralization, where each of the brain's two hemispheres is specialized. The left brain controls the right side of the body and in a human plays a primary role for language. So, if Neandertals were primarily right-handed, like modern humans, that fact could suggest a capacity for language.

Now, a new investigation by Frayer and an international team led by Virginie Volpato of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, has confirmed Regourdou's right-handedness by looking more closely at the robustness of the arms and shoulders, and comparing it with scratches on his teeth. Their findings are published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

"We've been studying scratch marks on Neandertal teeth, but in all cases they were isolated teeth, or teeth in mandibles not directly associated with skeletal material," said Frayer. "This is the first time we can check the pattern that's seen in the teeth with the pattern that's seen in the arms. We did a more sophisticated analysis of the arms—the collarbone, the humerus, the radius and the ulna—because we have them on both sides. And we looked at cortical thickness and other biomechanical measurements. All of them confirmed that everything was more robust on the right side than the left."

Frayer said Neandertals used their mouths like a "third hand" and that produced more wear and tear on the front teeth than their back ones. "It's long been known the Neandertals had been heavily processing things with their incisors and canines," he said.

Frayer's research on Regourdou's teeth confirmed the individual's right-handedness.

"We looked at the cut marks on the lower incisors and canines," said the KU researcher. "The marks that are on the lip side of the incisor teeth are oblique, or angled in such away that it indicates they were gripping with the left hand and cutting with the right, and every now and then they'd hit the teeth and leave these scratch marks that were there for the life of the individual."

Frayer said that the research on Regourdou shows that 89 percent of European Neandertal fossils (16 of 18) clearly preferred their right hands. This is very similar to the prevalence of right-handers in modern human populations—about 90 percent of people alive today favor their right hands.

Frayer and his co-authors conclude that such ratios suggest a Neandertal capacity for language.

"The long-known connection between brain asymmetry, handedness, and language in living populations serves as a proxy for estimating brain lateralization in the fossil record and the likelihood of language capacity in fossils," they write.

More information: PLoS ONE 7(8): e43949. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0043949

Provided by University of Kansas

"Research verifies a Neandertal's right-handedness, hinting at language capacity." August 24th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-08-neandertal-right-handedness-hinting-language-capacity.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

High-tech, remote-controlled camera for neurosurgery

© Thinkstock

(Phys.org)—A small camera inserted into the body enables surgeons to perform many types of operations with minimal trauma. EU-funding enabled researchers to extend the use of such interventions to a variety of neurosurgical applications.

The medical field has made great advances in minimising trauma associated with various surgical interventions. Use of surgical microscopes has been influential in guiding a surgeon's tools to the appropriate location and reducing tissue damaged in an effort to ensure all affected areas have been treated.

Within the last 30 years, more and more procedures have lent themselves to endoscopic intervention also called minimally invasive surgery (MIS).

A very small, flexible tube with a camera at its tip is inserted into an incision or natural body opening (e.g. nasal cavity) and directed to the appropriate site for diagnosis and treatment. The camera offers a wide panoramic view superior to the traditional conical view of a surgical microscope.

In the case of neurosurgery where operative and post-operative trauma can lead to debilitating loss of brain function and even death, endoscopic intervention is particularly attractive. However, limitations of available endoscopic surgical systems have excluded their use in many important neurosurgical applications.

In order to extend the use of potentially life-saving endoscopic surgery, European scientists initiated the 'Paraendoscopic intuitive computer assisted operating system' (PICO) project.

With EU-funding, the consortium of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and research and technology development (RTD) partners produced important endoscopic neurosurgical technology.

The PICO positioning system consisted of a balanced holding-and-motion device with fine motor-driven adjustment. The holding-and-motion system could be attached either to the operating table or to the patient's head.

A novel interface for remote control enabled the surgeon to steer the endoscope without removing their hands from the surgical instruments.

Scientists also incorporated a three-dimensional (3D) visualisation system capable of feeding data to a monitor or head-mounted display. The system enabled voice-controlled delivery of additional information such as pre-operative test results and ultrasound images.

Micro-mechanical surgical instruments for a number of tasks such as suctioning, cutting and sample-taking were specifically designed for endoscopic neurosurgery.

The PICO system is a particularly important contribution to the field of endoscopic neurosurgery. Its market availability should shorten many procedures while reducing associated surgical and post-operative trauma and thus morbidity and mortality.

Provided by CORDIS

"High-tech, remote-controlled camera for neurosurgery." August 24th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-high-tech-remote-controlled-camera-neurosurgery.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Researchers investigate early language acquisition in robots

(Phys.org)—Robotics research continues to grow in Europe. And the introduction of humanoid robots has compelled scientists to investigate the acquisition of language. A case in point is a team of researchers in the United Kingdom that studied the development of robots that could acquire linguistic skills. Presented in the journal PLoS ONE, the study focused on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child between 6 and 14 months of age, the transition from babbling to first word forms. The results, which shed light on the potential of human-robot interaction systems in studies investigating early language acquisition, are an outcome of the ITALK ('Integration and transfer of action and language knowledge in robots') project, which received EUR 6.3 million under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Scientists from the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom have discovered that a robot analogous to a child between 6 and 14 months old has the ability to develop rudimentary linguistic skills. The robot, called DeeChee, moved from various syllabic babble to various word forms, including colours and shapes, after it 'conversed' with humans. The latter group was told to speak to the robot as if it were a small child.

'It is known that infants are sensitive to the frequency of sounds in speech, and these experiments show how this sensitivity can be modelled and contribute to the learning of word forms by a robot,' said lead author Caroline Lyon of the University of Hertfordshire.

In their paper, the authors wrote: 'We wanted to explore human-robot interaction and were deliberately not prescriptive. However, leaving participants to talk naturally opened up possibilities of a wide range of behaviour, possibilities that were certainly realised. Some participants were better teachers than others: some of the less good produced very sparse utterances, while other talkative participants praised DeeChee whatever it did, which skewed the learning process towards non-words.'

The researchers said one of the reasons that the robot learnt the words is because the teacher said the words repeatedly, an already anticipated response. The second reason is that the non-salient word strings were variable, so their frequencies were spread about. According to the team, this phenomenon is the basis of a number of automated plagiarism detectors, where precise matches of short lexical strings indicate copying. Lastly, they said the phonemic representation of speech from the teacher to the robot is not a uniformly stable mapping of sounds.

'The frequencies of syllables in words with variable phonemic forms may be attenuated compared with those in salient content words, or parts of such words,' they wrote. 'It has long been realised that there is in practice a great deal of variation in spontaneous speech. This work shows the potential of human-interaction systems to be used in studies of language acquisition, and the iterative development methodology highlights how the embodied nature of interaction may bring to light important factors in the dynamics of language acquisition that would otherwise not occur to modellers.'

More information: Lyon, C., et al. 'Interactive Language Learning by Robots: The Transition from Babbling to Word Forms'. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38236. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038236

Provided by CORDIS

"Researchers investigate early language acquisition in robots." August 24th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-08-early-language-acquisition-robots.html

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Robot NICO learning self awareness using mirrors

(Phys.org)—Self awareness is one of the hallmarks of intelligence. We as human beings clearly understand that we are both our bodies and our minds and that others perceive us in ways differently than we perceive ourselves. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than when we look in a mirror.

In so doing we understand that the other person looking back, is really the three dimensional embodiment of who we really are as a complete person. For this reason, researchers use something called the mirror test as a means of discerning other animals' level of self awareness. They put a mark of some sort on the face without the animal knowing it, then allow the animal to look in a mirror; if the animal is able to comprehend that the mark is on its own face, and demonstrates as much by touching itself where it's been marked, than the animal is deemed to have self awareness. Thus far, very few have passed the test, some apes, dolphins and elephants. Now, researchers at Yale University are trying to program a robot that is able to pass the test as well.

The robot's name is NICO, and has been developed by Brian Scassellati and Justin Hart, who together have already taught the robot to recognize where its arm is in three dimensional space to a very fine degree, a feat never before achieved with a robot of any kind. The next step is to do the same with other body parts, the feet, legs torso and of course eventually the head, which is the most critical part in giving a robot self awareness, which is the ultimate goal of the project.

Programming a robot to have self awareness is considered to be one of the key milestones to creating robots that are truly useful in everyday life. Robots that "live" in people's homes for example, would have to have a very good understanding of where every part of itself is and what it's doing in order to prevent causing accidental harm to housemates. This is so because the movements of people are random and haphazard, so much so that people quite often accidently bump into one another. With robots, because they are likely to be stronger, such accidents would be unacceptable.

Scassellati and Hart believe they are getting close and expect NICO to be able to pass the mirror test within the next couple of months. No doubt others will be watching very closely, because if they meet with success it will be a truly historic moment.

© 2012 Phys.Org

"Robot NICO learning self awareness using mirrors." August 24th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-08-robot-nico-awareness-mirrors.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek