Jump to content

Michael Owren

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Kimoller (talk | contribs) at 06:40, 13 January 2015. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Michael J. Owren
BornJuly 9, 1955
Oslo, Norway
DiedJanuary 15, 2014
Atlanta, GA
NationalityAmerican
Alma materReed College (BA, 1977), Indiana University (PhD, 1986)
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology
Animal Communication
Evolution of Language

Michael J. Owren was a Norwegian born American psychologist who contributed to the understanding of animal communication, the evolution of language, emotional communication, and vocal acoustics. His work focused on vocal phenomena in both animals and humans. He pioneered digital spectral analysis techniques, first developed in speech science, for use in studies of animal communication. He studied primate vocalizations in terms of acoustics and communicative functions. He is perhaps best known as an incisive theorist in animal communication.

Academic history and awards

Owren studied and worked in the United States and New Zealand. He received a B.A. in psychology from Reed College in 1977 and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Indiana University in 1986. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, 1986-89 and a postgraduate research position at the California National Primate Research Center, the University of California, Davis, 1986-90. From 1990 until his death in 2014, Owren held faculty positions at the University of Colorado, Denver, the University of Otago in New Zealand, Reed College, Cornell University, Georgia State University, and Emory University. His research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, as well as by the National Geographic Society, and by the various institutions where he studied and held faculty positions. Owren served in editorial roles for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Emotion Review, Interaction Studies, the Journal of Comparative Psychology, and Psychological Science. He reviewed for numerous additional journals. He was awarded the status of Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science and the Acoustical Society of America. He received a National Service Research Award and the M. Z. Sinnott Memorial Primatological Research Fellowship. He was a member of the American Society of Primatologists, the Animal Behavior Society, the Comparative Cognition Society, the Emotion Research Group, and the International Primatological Society. He lectured widely around the world, often invited to speak in scientific venues. A few examples were an invited lecture for the Institute of Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University, Berlin (2001); a lecture on Comparative Cognition, evolutionary psychology, and brain evolution at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2005); a lecture on Encoding and decoding of biological signals at the Santa Fe Institute (2004); a workshop presentation on the role on subcortical primate-like circuitry in human vocal development for the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria (2005); and a workshop for the Ernst Strungmann Forum at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (2010).

Brief summary of works

Owren’s early scientific works included contributions on acoustic analysis of vocalizations in non-human primates [1] [2] [3]. As a pioneer of acoustic methods in animal communication, he co-edited a volume on the methods that underlie such research [4]. His work is perhaps best known for having challenged a widely cited view in animal communication in which it was claimed by the University of Pennsylvania supervisors of Owren’s postdoctoral fellowship, that some animals communicate semantically [5]. Owren’s later work, in collaboration with Drew Rendall (also a previous postdoctoral fellow in the same University of Pennsylvania program) and others, argued and provided empirical support for the contrasting idea that animal vocalizations have their effects by influencing attentional, arousal, emotional, and motivational states in the listener, rather than by imparting representational messages, as occurs in human language [6] [7] [8] [9].

Quotations

  • From the abstract to: Owren, M. J., Rendall, D., & Ryan, M. J. (2010). Redefining animal signaling: influence versus information in communication. Biological Philosophy, 25, 755–780 (2010)
    • Researchers typically define animal signaling as morphology or behavior specialized for transmitting encoded information from a signaler to a perceiver. Although intuitively appealing, this conception is inherently metaphorical and leaves concepts of both information and encoding undefined. To justify relying on the information construct, theorists often appeal to Shannon and Weaver’s quantitative definition. The two approaches are, however, fundamentally at odds. The predominant definition of animal signaling is thus untenable, which has a number of undesirable consequences for both theory and practice in the field. Theoretical problems include conceptual circularity and running afoul of fundamental evolutionary principles. Problems in empirical work include that research is often grounded in abstractions such as signal honesty and semanticity, and thereby distracted from more basic and concrete factors shaping communication. A revised definition is therefore proposed, making influence rather than transmission of encoded information the central function of animal signaling.
  • From page 774: Owren, M. J., Rendall, D., & Ryan, M. J. (2010). Redefining animal signaling: influence versus information in communication. Biological Philosophy, 25, 755–780 (2010)
    • A principled approach would have to be able to distinguish communication from non-communication based on the presence or absence of encoded information in a possible signal. As noted earlier, however, the concepts of encoding and information are not subject to empirical testing. From an influence-based perspective, each of the aforementioned events does constitute signaling, so long as specialization and influence are demonstrably involved. The larger argument is that communication is not inherently different from other evolved functions in non-human animals, and is granted no special status or ineffable, unmeasurable properties. In this view, signaling simply comprises the very large set of morphological traits and behavioral actions through which one individual can influence the behavior of another.


Additional readings from Michael J. Owren

  • Davila Ross, M., Owren, M. J., & Zimmermann, E. (2010). The evolution of laughter in great apes and humans. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 3(2), 191-194.
  • Bachorowski, J., & Owren, M. J. (1999). Acoustic correlates of talker sex and individual talker identity are present in a short vowel segment produced in running speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(2), 1054-1063.
  • Davila Ross, M., Owren, M. J., & Zimmermann, E. (2009). Reconstructing the evolution of laughter in great apes and humans. Current Biology, 19, 1106-1111. doi: doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.028.
  • Owren, M. J., Dieter, J. A., Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (1992). 'Food' calls produced by adult female rhesus (Macaca mulatta) and Japanese (M. fuscata) macaques, their normally-raised offspring, and offspring cross fostered between species. Behaviour, 120, 218-231.
  • Owren, M. J., & Goldstein, M. H. (2008). Scaffolds for babbling: Innateness and learning in the emergence of contextually flexible vocal production in human infants. In D. K. Oller & U. Griebel (Eds.), Evolution of Communicative Flexibility: Complexity, Creativity and Adaptability in Human and Animal Communication (pp. 169-192). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Owren, M. J., & Linker, C. D. (1995). Some analysis methods that may be useful to acoustic primatologists. In E. Zimmerman, J. D. Newman & U. Jürgens (Eds.), Current topics in primate vocal communication. New York: Plenum Press.
  • Owren, M. J., Linker, C. D., & Rowe, M. P. (1993). Acoustic features of tonal 'grunt' calls in baboons. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 1823.
  • Rendall, D., & Owren, M. J. (2013). Communication without meaning or information: abandoning language-based and informational constructs in animal communication theory. In U. E. Stegmann (Ed.), Animal Communication Theory: Information and Influence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Heimbauer, L. A., Beran, M. J., and Owren, M. J. (2013). Evidence for cognitive restoration of time-reversed speech by a language-trained chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 134(5):4031.


Category:Indiana University alumni Category:Reed College (Oregon) alumni Category:Psychologists Category:Dead people

  1. ^ Owren, M. J., and Bernacki, R. H. (1988). The Acoustic features of vervet monkey alarm calls (Cercopithecus aethiops). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, 1927-35.
  2. ^ Owren, M. J. and Casale, T. M. (1994). Variations in fundamental frequency peak position in Japanese macaques (Maccaca fuscata) “coo” calls. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 108, 291-7.
  3. ^ Owren, M. J., Seyfarth, R. M., and Cheney, D. L. (1997). The Acoustic features of vowel-like grunt calls in chacma baboons (Papio cynocephalus ursinus): Implications for production processes and functions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101, 2951-63.
  4. ^ Hopp, S. L., Owren, M. J., and Evans, C. S. (1998). Animal Acoustic Communication: Sound analysis and research methods. New York: Springer-Verlag
  5. ^ Seyfarth, R. M., Cheney, D. L., & Marler, P. (1980). Vervet monkey alarm calls: Semantic communication in a free-ranging primate. Animal Behaviour, 28, 1070-1094.
  6. ^ Owren, M. J., & Rendall, D. (2001). Sound on the rebound: Bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling. Evolutionary Anthropology, 10, 58-71.
  7. ^ Rendall, D., Owren, M. J., & Ryan, M. J. (2009). What do animal signals mean? Animal Behaviour, 78, 233–240.
  8. ^ Owren, M. J., Rendall, D., & Ryan, M. J. (2010). Redefining animal signaling: influence versus information in communication. Biological Philosophy, 25, 755–780.
  9. ^ Owren, M. J., Amoss, R. T., & Rendall, D. (2011). Two organizing principles of vocal production: Implications for nonhuman and human primates. American Journal of Primatology, 73, 530-544.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Owren&oldid=642270424"