Primate cognition
Encyclopedia
Primate cognition is the study of the cognitive
abilities of non-human primate
s. Humans are also primates but, traditionally, humans have been thought to be different from other animals. Darwin may have been the first to think otherwise when he jotted in his notebook:
Primates are capable of high levels of cognition; some make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; some have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative
and capable of deception; they can recognise kin
and conspecifics; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence.
?" was a contentious issue because of the problem of inferring from animal behavior the existence of thinking
, of the existence of a concept of self
or self-awareness
, or of particular thoughts.
Non-human research still has a major place in this field, however, and is especially useful in illuminating which nonverbal behaviors signify components of theory of mind, and in pointing to possible stepping points in the evolution of what many claim to be a uniquely human aspect of social cognition. While it is difficult to study human-like theory of mind and mental states in species which we do not yet describe as "minded" at all, and about whose potential mental states we have an incomplete understanding, researchers can focus on simpler components of more complex capabilities.
For example, many researchers focus on animals' understanding of intention, gaze, perspective, or knowledge (or rather, what another being has seen). Part of the difficulty in this line of research is that observed phenomena can often be explained as simple stimulus-response learning, as it is in the nature of any theorizers of mind to have to extrapolate internal mental states from observable behavior. Recently, most non-human theory of mind research has focused on monkeys and great apes, who are of most interest in the study of the evolution of human social cognition.
There has been some controversy over the interpretation of evidence purporting to show theory of mind ability—or inability—in animals. Two examples serve as demonstration: first, Povinelli et al. (1990) presented chimpanzees with the choice of two experimenters from which to request food: one who had seen where food was hidden, and one who, by virtue of one of a variety of mechanisms (having a bucket or bag over his head; a blindfold over his eyes; or being turned away from the baiting) does not know, and can only guess. They found that the animals failed in most cases to differentially request food from the "knower." By contrast, Hare, Call, and Tomasello (2001) found that subordinate chimpanzees were able to use the knowledge state of dominant rival chimpanzees to determine which container of hidden food they approached.
Tomasello and like-minded colleagues who originally argued that great apes did not have theory of mind have since reversed their position. Povinelli and his colleagues, however, maintain that Tomasello's group has misinterpreted the results of their experiments. They point out that most evidence in support of great ape theory of mind involves naturalistic settings to which the apes may have already adapted through past learning. Their "reinterpretation hypothesis" explains away all current evidence supporting attribution of mental states to others in chimpanzees as merely evidence of risk-based learning; that is, the chimpanzees learn through experience that certain behaviors in other chimpanzees have a probability of leading to certain responses, without necessarily attributing knowledge or other intentional states to those other chimpanzees. They therefore propose testing theory of mind abilities in great apes in novel, and not naturalistic settings. Kristin Andrews takes the reinterpretation hypothesis one step further, arguing that it implies that even the well-known false-belief test used to test children's theory of mind is susceptible to being interpreted as a result of learning.
There is howewer no reason to dismiss theory of mind just because "it is learned", since the idea of irreplacable innate capabilities are based on research on binary computers and do not reflect how real brains work. Real brains learn by statistical degrees of association, which emerges into mind without any need for fundamentally special skills. While the limited number of neurons in an ape brain may put some constrains on how far the understanding can go, the idea of dismissing concrete evidence of basic eye-serving "because it is learned" or because "it can be something else" is actually metaphysical definition quibble with no scientific justification whatsoever. Learned skills are patently not false just because they are learned, and there is no reason to believe that something unlearnable even could evolve through evolution, since learning is stimuli sorting among synapses and evolution is selection sorting among alleles.
research. Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee, was successfully taught 125 signs during his life, though some disagree that this really constituted language. There have been other, more successful animal language projects, such as Kanzi
and Koko
, as well as some parrots.
It has been suggested that Nim Chimpskys limited success were due to short and boring training sessions nothing like true language learning, and that his total lack of grammar was merely a result of a sub-200 symbols vocabulary.
sharpen sticks to use as spear
s when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.
started writing a book on problem solving titled The Mentality of Apes (1917). In this research, Köhler observed the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders in order to retrieve the food. If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms.
Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American psychologist Edward Thorndike
had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning, through his law of effect
), but rather that they had experienced an insight
(also sometimes known as an “aha experience”), in which, having realized the answer, they then proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler’s words, “unwaveringly purposeful.”
A decade later Premacks wrote: "Though she [Sarah] understood the question, she did not herself ask any questions -- unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny's house? Where puppy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else".
Despite all their achievements, Kanzi and Panbanisha also have not demonstrated the ability to ask questions so far. Joseph Jordania
suggested that the ability to ask questions could be the crucial cognitive threshold between human
and ape
mental abilities. Jordania suggested that asking questions is not a matter of the ability of using syntactic structures, that it is primarily a matter of cognitive ability. Questions can be (and are) asked without the use of syntactic structures, with the help of the questions intonation only (like this is the case in children's early pre-linguistic development).
One evidence that the limitations of ape language is inseparably intertwined with the limitation of ape non-linguistic cognition is that their inability to ask questions do have a counterpart in their investigation of their physical environment. Apes who fail to perform a practical task that is a modification of one they previously accomplished, but has been modified to be physically impossible, do not investigate why it failed. Instead they just keep trying in the same way for different periods of time, varying depending on their level of patience. It has been suggested that this skill may have emerged in early Homo
as a result of increased brain capacity adaptive to regular problem solving through toolmaking.
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
abilities of non-human primate
Primate
A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...
s. Humans are also primates but, traditionally, humans have been thought to be different from other animals. Darwin may have been the first to think otherwise when he jotted in his notebook:
Primates are capable of high levels of cognition; some make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; some have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative
Psychological manipulation
Psychological manipulation is a type of social influence that aims to change the perception or behavior of others through underhanded, deceptive, or even abusive tactics. By advancing the interests of the manipulator, often at the other's expense, such methods could be considered exploitative,...
and capable of deception; they can recognise kin
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
and conspecifics; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence.
Theory of mind
Premack and Woodruff's 1978 article "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mindTheory of mind
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own...
?" was a contentious issue because of the problem of inferring from animal behavior the existence of thinking
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
, of the existence of a concept of self
Self (psychology)
The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the...
or self-awareness
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals...
, or of particular thoughts.
Non-human research still has a major place in this field, however, and is especially useful in illuminating which nonverbal behaviors signify components of theory of mind, and in pointing to possible stepping points in the evolution of what many claim to be a uniquely human aspect of social cognition. While it is difficult to study human-like theory of mind and mental states in species which we do not yet describe as "minded" at all, and about whose potential mental states we have an incomplete understanding, researchers can focus on simpler components of more complex capabilities.
For example, many researchers focus on animals' understanding of intention, gaze, perspective, or knowledge (or rather, what another being has seen). Part of the difficulty in this line of research is that observed phenomena can often be explained as simple stimulus-response learning, as it is in the nature of any theorizers of mind to have to extrapolate internal mental states from observable behavior. Recently, most non-human theory of mind research has focused on monkeys and great apes, who are of most interest in the study of the evolution of human social cognition.
There has been some controversy over the interpretation of evidence purporting to show theory of mind ability—or inability—in animals. Two examples serve as demonstration: first, Povinelli et al. (1990) presented chimpanzees with the choice of two experimenters from which to request food: one who had seen where food was hidden, and one who, by virtue of one of a variety of mechanisms (having a bucket or bag over his head; a blindfold over his eyes; or being turned away from the baiting) does not know, and can only guess. They found that the animals failed in most cases to differentially request food from the "knower." By contrast, Hare, Call, and Tomasello (2001) found that subordinate chimpanzees were able to use the knowledge state of dominant rival chimpanzees to determine which container of hidden food they approached.
Tomasello and like-minded colleagues who originally argued that great apes did not have theory of mind have since reversed their position. Povinelli and his colleagues, however, maintain that Tomasello's group has misinterpreted the results of their experiments. They point out that most evidence in support of great ape theory of mind involves naturalistic settings to which the apes may have already adapted through past learning. Their "reinterpretation hypothesis" explains away all current evidence supporting attribution of mental states to others in chimpanzees as merely evidence of risk-based learning; that is, the chimpanzees learn through experience that certain behaviors in other chimpanzees have a probability of leading to certain responses, without necessarily attributing knowledge or other intentional states to those other chimpanzees. They therefore propose testing theory of mind abilities in great apes in novel, and not naturalistic settings. Kristin Andrews takes the reinterpretation hypothesis one step further, arguing that it implies that even the well-known false-belief test used to test children's theory of mind is susceptible to being interpreted as a result of learning.
There is howewer no reason to dismiss theory of mind just because "it is learned", since the idea of irreplacable innate capabilities are based on research on binary computers and do not reflect how real brains work. Real brains learn by statistical degrees of association, which emerges into mind without any need for fundamentally special skills. While the limited number of neurons in an ape brain may put some constrains on how far the understanding can go, the idea of dismissing concrete evidence of basic eye-serving "because it is learned" or because "it can be something else" is actually metaphysical definition quibble with no scientific justification whatsoever. Learned skills are patently not false just because they are learned, and there is no reason to believe that something unlearnable even could evolve through evolution, since learning is stimuli sorting among synapses and evolution is selection sorting among alleles.
Language
The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal languageAnimal language
Animal language is the modeling of human language in non human animal systems. While the term is widely used, researchers agree that animal languages are not as complex or expressive as human language....
research. Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee, was successfully taught 125 signs during his life, though some disagree that this really constituted language. There have been other, more successful animal language projects, such as Kanzi
Kanzi
Kanzi , also known by the lexigram , is a male bonobo who has been featured in several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the bonobo throughout her life, Kanzi has exhibited advanced linguistic aptitude.- Biography :Born to Lorel and...
and Koko
Koko (gorilla)
Koko is a female western lowland gorilla who, according to Francine "Penny" Patterson, is able to understand more than 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and understand approximately 2,000 words of spoken English....
, as well as some parrots.
It has been suggested that Nim Chimpskys limited success were due to short and boring training sessions nothing like true language learning, and that his total lack of grammar was merely a result of a sub-200 symbols vocabulary.
Tool use
Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannahSavannah
Savannah or savanna is a type of grassland.It can also mean:-People:* Savannah King, a Canadian freestyle swimmer* Savannah Outen, a singer who gained popularity on You Tube...
sharpen sticks to use as spear
Spear
A spear is a pole weapon consisting of a shaft, usually of wood, with a pointed head.The head may be simply the sharpened end of the shaft itself, as is the case with bamboo spears, or it may be made of a more durable material fastened to the shaft, such as flint, obsidian, iron, steel or...
s when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.
Problem solving
In 1913, Wolfgang KöhlerWolfgang Köhler
Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.-Early life:...
started writing a book on problem solving titled The Mentality of Apes (1917). In this research, Köhler observed the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders in order to retrieve the food. If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms.
Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American psychologist Edward Thorndike
Edward Thorndike
Edward Lee "Ted" Thorndike was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on animal behavior and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology...
had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning, through his law of effect
Law of effect
The law of effect basically states that “responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again inthat situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that...
), but rather that they had experienced an insight
Insight
Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context. Insight can be used with several related meanings:*a piece of information...
(also sometimes known as an “aha experience”), in which, having realized the answer, they then proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler’s words, “unwaveringly purposeful.”
Asking questions and giving negative answers
In the 1970s and the 1980s there had been suggestions that apes are unable to ask questions and to give negative answers. According to the numerous published studies apes are able to answer human questions, and the vocabulary of the acculturated apes contains question words. Despite these abilities, according to the published research literature, apes are not able to ask questions themselves, and in human-primate conversations questions are asked by the humans only. Ann and David Premacks designed a potentially promising methodology to teach apes to ask questions in the 1970s: “In principle interrogation can be taught either by removing an element from a familiar situation in the animal’s world or by removing the element from a language that maps the animal’s world. It is probable that one can induce questions by purposefully removing key elements from a familiar situation. Suppose a chimpanzee received its daily ration of food at a specific time and place, and then one day the food was not there. A chimpanzee trained in the interrogative might inquire ‘Where is my food?’ or, in Sarah’s case, ‘My food is ?’ Sarah was never put in a situation that might induce such interrogation because for our purposes it was easier to teach Sarah to answer questions”.A decade later Premacks wrote: "Though she [Sarah] understood the question, she did not herself ask any questions -- unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny's house? Where puppy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else".
Despite all their achievements, Kanzi and Panbanisha also have not demonstrated the ability to ask questions so far. Joseph Jordania
Joseph Jordania
Joseph Jordania is an Australian-Georgian ethnomusicologist and evolutionary musicologist. In some early publications his name was spelled as Zhordania...
suggested that the ability to ask questions could be the crucial cognitive threshold between human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
and ape
Ape
Apes are Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea. The apes are native to Africa and South-east Asia, although in relatively recent times humans have spread all over the world...
mental abilities. Jordania suggested that asking questions is not a matter of the ability of using syntactic structures, that it is primarily a matter of cognitive ability. Questions can be (and are) asked without the use of syntactic structures, with the help of the questions intonation only (like this is the case in children's early pre-linguistic development).
One evidence that the limitations of ape language is inseparably intertwined with the limitation of ape non-linguistic cognition is that their inability to ask questions do have a counterpart in their investigation of their physical environment. Apes who fail to perform a practical task that is a modification of one they previously accomplished, but has been modified to be physically impossible, do not investigate why it failed. Instead they just keep trying in the same way for different periods of time, varying depending on their level of patience. It has been suggested that this skill may have emerged in early Homo
Homo
Homo may refer to:*the Greek prefix ὅμο-, meaning "the same"*the Latin for man, human being*Homo, the taxonomical genus including modern humans...
as a result of increased brain capacity adaptive to regular problem solving through toolmaking.
See also
- Animal cognitionAnimal cognitionAnimal cognition is the title given to the study of the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology...
- Hominid intelligenceHominid intelligenceThe evolution of human intelligence refers to a set of theories that attempt to explain how human intelligence has evolved. These theories are closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the emergence of human language....
- Great ape languageGreat Ape languageResearch into non-human great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans to communicate with human beings and with each other using sign language, physical tokens, and lexigrams; see Yerkish...
- Primate empathy
- Chimpanzee intelligence