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Compression as a universal principle of animal behavior
Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho1, Antoni Hernández-Fernández, David Lusseau
1Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Lab, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, TALP Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Cognitive Science
|July 31, 2013
Summary
Animal behavior, including human language, follows Zipf's law of brevity, suggesting efficient coding. This study demonstrates that minimizing code length directly implies this law, supporting compression as a general principle in animal communication.
Area of Science:
- Biology
- Psychology
- Animal Behavior
- Linguistics
- Information Theory
Background:
- A fundamental principle in biology and psychology is understanding animal behavior.
- Zipf's law of brevity, where frequent words are shorter, is observed in human language and some animal behaviors.
- This law has been linked to efficient coding, but a direct connection to information-theoretic compression is lacking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To establish a direct link between Zipf's law of brevity and the principle of compression in animal behavior.
- To demonstrate that minimizing expected code length necessitates adherence to Zipf's law.
- To investigate the role of compression in the efficiency of animal communication.
Main Methods:
- Theoretical analysis connecting code length minimization to word frequency.
- Empirical analysis of word length and frequency in human language.
- Comparative analysis of behavioral patterns in various non-human animal species.
Main Results:
- Minimizing expected code length directly implies that word length cannot increase with frequency.
- Human language exhibits significantly short mean code lengths.
- Observed conformity to Zipf's law in other animal species correlates with small mean code lengths.
Conclusions:
- Compression, or minimizing expected code length, is a fundamental principle driving animal behavior.
- The observed adherence to Zipf's law of brevity across species reflects selection for efficient information coding.
- This principle likely underlies diverse communication systems in the animal kingdom.
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