ArticleScientific reports2022
Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Evidence for compositional abilities in one-year-old infants.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Higher-Order Logical Reasoning in Preschool Children: Evidence from Intonation and Quantifier Scope.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Testing semantic compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through relearning and generalization.PloS one · 2025Article
- A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults.PloS one · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Can non-human animals combine abstract representations much like humans do with language? In particular, can they entertain a compositional representation such as 'not blue'? Across two experiments, we demonstrate that baboons (Papio papio) show a capacity for compositionality. Experiment 1 showed that baboons can entertain negative, compositional, representations: they can learn to associate a cue with iconically related referents (e.g., a blue patch referring to all blue objects), but also to the complement set associated with it (e.g., a blue patch referring to all non-blue objects). Strikingly, Experiment 2 showed that baboons not only learn to associate a cue with iconically related referents, but can learn to associate complex cues (composed of the same cue and an additional visual element) with the complement object set. Thus, they can learn an operation, instantiated by this additional visual element, that can be compositionally combined with previously learned cues. These results significantly reduce any claim that would make the manipulation and combination of abstract representations a solely human privilege.
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