The Truth About Animals
Is your toddler really smarter than a chimpanzee?
It sounds like a no-brainer, but it's not clear that young children are
any more intelligent than chimpanzees
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Presented by
Justin Gregg
I've spent the last four years teaching my daughter to be human.
There's a lot to learn, from walking, talking and the (strangely
challenging) task of not soiling yourself, to how to make choux
pastry, Chinese history and the basics of quadratic equations.
Although we still have some way to go, it already feels like a hefty
parental investment, especially when compared with species like the
blue wildebeest, whose newborns can stand, walk, and even outrun
predators just a few hours after leaving the womb. But humans aren't
the only species genetically predisposed to spend years rearing their
offspring. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, also enjoy a prolonged
childhood. As a socially complex species, their infants stick close to
their mothers for the first five years of life, picking up a laundry list of
essential skills by observing and imitating their elders.
Telling a Picasso from a Monet, for example, should be easy for a
chimpanzee
Many skills that we consider complex are in fact the result of
relatively simple - and often universal - cognitive abilities shared by a
great many species
Of course, the life skills a chimpanzee eventually acquires are
nowhere near as complex as those I'm teaching my daughter. Don't
get me wrong – learning how to make a termite-fishing stick is
cognitively complex, but it's hardly up there with learning to read, or
being able to differentiate between a Picasso and a Monet. After four
years of dedicated training from her parents, my daughter should be
able to beat a chimpanzee in a battle of wits, right?
Wrong. Or at least, it depends on the battle. In fact telling a Picasso
from a Monet, for example, should be easy for a chimpanzee – both
honeybees and pigeons have been trained to do it. Scientists taught
these small-brained species that chambers next to pictures by one or
other of these artists contained food. When later presented with new
Picassos and Monets, they were more likely to opt for the artist whose
work had previously led them to a reward - meaning they had picked
up on underlying stylistic differences. Many skills that we consider
complex are in fact the result of relatively simple - and often universal
- cognitive abilities shared by a great many species.
In reality, when it comes to cognitive development, the divide between
infant chimpanzees and infant humans is often startlingly small
. So small in fact that psychologists once wondered if the key
difference between the two species was not our underlying mental
machinery, but the cultural traditions and recorded knowledge that
humans had accumulated through the ages. Perhaps if an infant
chimpanzee was raised in an exclusively human environment, it would
acquire human abilities, complete with language competency and
table manners.
Previous experiments showed chimpanzees lacked the vocal
structures to produce the sounds of human language
In order to test this hypothesis, Allen and Beatrix Gardner,
psychologists at the University of Nevada, Reno, acquired a 10-
month-old chimpanzee named Washoe . She had been born in the wild
in West Africa in 1965, where she was "recruited" by the US Air Force
for use in biomedical testing as part of the space programme. The
Gardeners brought Washoe into their home in 1966. She was dressed
in human clothes, and joined the Gardeners at the dinner table each
evening. Every effort was made to replicate the childhood of a typical
human infant with the hope that she would not just learn human
language, but learn to be human.
Aware from previous experiments that showed chimpanzees lacked
the vocal structures to produce the sounds of human language,
Washoe was taught to communicate using a form of American Sign
Language. By the time she left the Gardeners in 1970, she could
communicate using a few hundred signed symbols. For some, the fact
that she could combine symbols to form new words such as "water
bird" when shown a swan for the first time was evidence of at least
rudimentary language capacity. Many scientists, however, remained
skeptical, suggesting Washoe and other apes were simply responding
to unintentional cues from the researchers working with them.
It was obvious from the Gardeners' experiment that being raised in a
human environment could not give a chimpanzee a human mind.
Although she was one of the first non-human apes to communicate
with humans in the form of signed symbols, she did not ever truly
acquire language. The question scientists still wrestle with today is
what exactly is going on in the minds of toddlers that allows them to
acquire and use language where chimpanzees fail? And how does this
relate to the skills that define human intelligence, allowing us to
create moon landers and chai lattes?
The human need for deeply cooperative group living brought with
it the ability to get into each other's heads
Michael Tomasello, a psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has spent
the last 30 years studying primate cognition in an effort to answer
questions like these. In his recently published book A Natural History
of Human Thinking, he develops the "shared intentionality" hypothesis
to explain the basic difference between human and chimpanzee
cognition. He defines this as the ability "to participate with others in
collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions
".
"Although humans' great ape ancestors were social beings, they lived
mostly individualistic and competitive lives," suggests Tomasello, "but
early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances
into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became more
directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve
joint goals or even collective goals. And this changed everything."
This human need for deeply cooperative group living brought with it
the ability to get into each other's heads. Being able to share
intentions and goals in this way is extremely rare in the animal
kingdom, and many experiments suggest that it's a skill that my
daughter has, but that chimpanzees - like Washoe - lack.
Consider the enigma of human pointing – a strangely difficult signal
for chimpanzees to wrap their heads around. They do not typically
point in the wild, although individuals working with humans in the lab
will often gesture towards food or objects they want, and sometimes
they do so with a pointed finger. What scientists want to know
however is whether or not a pointing chimpanzee is trying to connect
with the person watching them by establishing collaborative, two-way
communication. It is obviously a communicative act, but the question
is whether it is the result of the chimpanzee trying to get inside the
head of the observer to convey the message: "Excuse me, I would
really like you to fetch that banana for me."
Whereas the babies sat politely and pointed toward the object in
an attempt to get their caregiver's attention, the chimpanzees
moved towards the object while making pointing and reaching
gestures
For humans, these collaborative messages are commonplace, even
without the use of language. Imagine for a moment that I had lost my
voice. I could ask my wife to pass the salt simply by pointing to the
salt shaker sitting on the table. Via this signal, I could share with my
wife the knowledge that I want the salt, and she would immediately
realize that I am asking for her help in achieving what I hope is now
a shared goal. I don't need to fling myself across the table while
making exaggerated grabbing motions.
Chimpanzees, on the other hand, do. In a recent experiment,
chimpanzees were pitted against one-year-old children to see how
their behaviour differed when something they wanted was just out of
reach. Whereas the babies sat politely and pointed toward the object
in an attempt to get their caregiver's attention, the chimpanzees
moved towards the object while making pointing and reaching
gestures. The key difference, the researchers concluded, was that the
human infants realized the pointing gesture alone was enough to tell
their caregiver what they wanted.
Humans, it seems, are born ready to share their thoughts with others.
Once we set aside the cognitive traits that encompass Tomasello's
idea of shared intentionality, however, the list of skills that my
daughter possesses that surpass those of chimpanzees is nearly
exhausted. In fact, there are cognitive skills at which chimpanzees can
easily outshine my daughter. Or you and me for that matter.
In another recent study, chimps went head-to-head with humans in a
test of their strategic thinking
. Participants played a simple two player computer game in which
they had to choose one of two squares displayed on a screen. Player
one won if both players chose the same square, and player two won if
both of them chose the opposite squares. After each game, the two
players could see which one their opponent had chosen, allowing
them to learn about their opponent's behaviour and make educated
guesses about their future choices. Players were pitted against others
of their own species, and human winners were rewarded with cash
prizes while chimps that came out on top got pieces of apple.
If the players make the best possible moves, the game should develop
a specific pattern predicted by game theory. It turned out that after
playing the game for a while, chimpanzees made moves that closely
resembled the optimal strategy predicted by mathematical models.
Humans, on the other hand, didn't.
Perhaps humans just don't have the level of fighting spirit (or
desire for infidelity) that gives chimpanzees the edge in some
battles of wits
With our infamous critical thinking skills, how could humans wind up
being soundly beaten by chimpanzees? We know from previous
research that chimpanzees can have stunning visual memory, and this
might be the key to their success. Ayumu, a young chimpanzee
involved in cognitive research at the Primate Institute of Kyoto
University, in Japan, is famously able to memorize the position of the
numbers one to nine in random positions on a screen in as little as
0.67 seconds. No human even came close to Ayumu's performance.
The scientists studying Ayumu suggest that chimpanzees simply have
a better working memory for visual information than humans
- which might explain why they can beat us in strategy games
involving visual tasks.
The researchers who ran the computer game experiment suggest that
it might also be the ultra-competitive mindset of the chimpanzee that
makes them better at developing strategies. Chimpanzees live in a
social world where they are often trying to outwit other members of
their inner circle. Lower ranking males, for example, try to outwit the
alpha males by having secret trysts with females behind their backs.
Plotting and scheming might be second nature to chimpanzees.
Perhaps humans just don't have the level of fighting spirit (or desire
for infidelity) that gives chimpanzees the edge in some battles of wits.
Maybe in some cognitive realms our bias towards co-operating lets
us down.
All of which leaves me wondering whether it's really fair to consider
my young daughter to be any smarter than a chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees lead lives that are not all that dissimilar from our own
recent ancestors in the days before we invented, and were able to
share our knowledge of, medicine, mathematics and physics. And
much of the social behaviour, problem solving, and reasoning
displayed by chimpanzees frolicking in the bush is still
indistinguishable from children playing in the schoolyard. And, as
we've seen, they even outperform humans at some skills.
In the end, though, it's not about who’s smarter. Both chimpanzees
and humans have cognitive skills that help them survive in their own
worlds. Over the next few years, my daughter's mind will blossom in
uniquely human ways. She'll tap into her shared intentionality
skillset, and join the ranks of schoolchildren learning their ABCs and
capital cities. Thanks to her human mind, this knowledge will be
transferred straight from her teacher's mind to hers through the
medium of language. These skills don't make my daughter any
smarter than a chimpanzee because smartness is a concept that is in
the eye of the beholder.
From my very human perspective, experiencing my daughter wanting
to share her thoughts with me is about the best thing in the whole
wide world. I suspect chimpanzee mothers love their young just as
deeply though, even if they can't – or don't want to – tell anyone
about it. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141012-are-toddlers-smarter-than-chimps