Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- Mice have a vocabulary of about 20 different phrases.
- A clever new neural-network-based application reveals what mice used in research say.
- Spoiler: The conversation changes when a female shows up
Rodents are chatty little creatures, and even if mice aren’t really hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, as they’re portrayed to be in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they do seem to speak in their own very high-pitched way. They have what University of Washington researcher Kevin Coffey characterizes as “a rich repertoire of calls” — around 20 of them.
But what could they be saying?
On Jan. 4, Coffey and his colleague, Russell Marx, published a study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology that delves into this mystery. Through a new software application they’ve developed called “DeepSqueak,” the duo has made several insights.
DeepSqueak? Really?
(UW Medicine/Big Think)
DeepSqueak squeaks, visualized
Mouse vocalizations are largely in the high-frequency, ultrasonic range — much higher, around 100 kHz, than we can hear — and automated analysis tools until now have fallen short. Noise confuses those programs, they’re held back by static algorithms, and they’re slow….
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