Reflecting on Dr. Nowicki

When I think of a guest speaker talk from the last eight weeks that has truly fascinated me, I immediately go back to that first week, when Dr. Steve Nowicki gave his talk on categorical perception. Categorical perception is the idea that organisms perceive certain things – such as color or sound – in distinct categories rather than on a continuous spectrum. He described this phenomenon using an interesting example: bird song. Bird song is perceived in a discrete manner, meaning that slight variations are still perceived similarly if they are “close enough” to be in the same category. This is the same as speech in humans – slight variations in speech are still perceived in the same way if they are in the same “category,” as in phonemes. Upon hearing this talk, I found an interesting connection to previous courses I have taken, particularly my first semester FOCUS class, Neuroscience and Human Language. In this class, we discussed what made human language so unique. One of the things that made human language so unique in comparison to other animals’ mode of communication is that language is context-dependent in humans. Prior to the research done by Dr. Nowicki, there had not been much to show that other animals have the ability to communicate in a manner as complex as humans. With research done on categorical perception in bird song, however, it was shown that note types can be categorized differently depending on context. Overall, I thought Dr. Nowicki’s talk was incredibly insightful, and I was glad to learn about something that connected so much with my previous coursework.