Interesting Links for 22-02-2026

[andrewducker]

1. Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

(tags:language chicken psychology )

Comments

[pseudomonas]

PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1.full.pdf

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

I'm intrigued by it, but it does seem very odd.

[doubtingmichael]

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that within ten years this experiment will appear somewhere in a "debunking bad experiments" story. Psychology seems very prone to that sort of thing.

Or, on reflection: maybe it's a real phenomenon, but unrelated to what is going on in humans. The experimenters looked for this one difference: maybe chicks have a vast range of inbuilt preferences.

[andrewducker]

I actually agree. Seems unlikely that it would work similarly.

But it's possible that "sharp" and "painful" are linked in our brains, and higher pitched noises are painful in some way? Maybe?

[doubtingmichael]

I thought about this some more, and it occurs to me that the original study (which I do believe) is really just a single data point.

Which is spikier: kookou or beeba? Tootou or heeha? Which shape is more like a bouba? And so on.

I daresay psychologists are already asking these questions in experiments. Probably their results will allow predictive theories to be invented.

[andrewducker]

The study in humans seems pretty solid. I'm just fascinated and confused by extending it to baby chickens!