Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (15 page)

Nadia Ladygina-Kohts was a pioneer in animal cognition, who studied not only primates but also parrots, such as this macaw. Working in Moscow at around the same time that Köhler conducted his research, she remains far less known.

My own fascination with this unsung hero’s work took me to Moscow, too. I received a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, where I leafed through private picture albums. Kohts was (and is) much beloved in her country, where she is widely recognized as the great scientist that she was. My biggest surprise was to learn that she owned at least three large parrots. Pictures show her accepting an object handed to her by a cockatoo, and her holding out a tray with three cups toward a macaw. The parrots would sit opposite her, on a table, while Kohts held a small food reward in one hand and a pencil in the other, scoring their choices as she tested their ability to discriminate among objects. I checked with our contemporary expert on Psittaciformes, the American psychologist Irene Pepperberg, but she had never heard of Kohts’s parrot studies. I doubt that anyone in the West ever suspected that bird cognition, too, was studied in Russia well before it became more widely known.

Alex the Parrot

I first met Alex, the African gray that Irene raised and studied for three decades, on visits to her department from a nearby university. Irene had bought the bird in a pet store, in 1977, and was setting up an ambitious project that would open the public eye to the avian mind. It ended up paving the way for all subsequent studies of bird intelligence, because until then the general opinion had been that bird brains simply don’t support advanced cognition. Due to their lack of much of anything that looks like a mammalian cortex, birds were viewed as well endowed with instincts yet poor at learning, let alone thinking. Despite the fact that their brains can be quite sizable—the African gray’s is the size of a shelled walnut, with a large area that functions like a cerebral cortex—and that their natural behavior offers ample reason to question the low opinion of them, the different brain organization of birds has been held against them.

Having myself kept and studied jackdaws—members of that other large-brained bird family, the corvids—I have never had any doubt about their behavioral flexibility. On walks through the park, my birds would tease dogs by flying right in front of their heads, just out of reach of their snapping mouths, to the surprise and chagrin of the dog owners. Indoors, they would play object hiding with me: I would hide a small item, such as a cork, under a pillow or behind a flower pot, while they would try to find it, or vice versa. This game relied on the well-known food-caching talents of crows and jays but also suggested
object permanence
: the understanding that an object continues to exist even after it has disappeared from view. The extreme playfulness of my jackdaws hinted, as it does with animals in general, at high intelligence and the thrill of a challenge. Visiting Irene, I was quite prepared to be impressed by a bird, therefore, and Alex did not disappoint. Cockily sitting on his perch, he had begun to learn labels for items such as keys, triangles, and squares, saying “key,” “three-corner,” or “four-corner” whenever these objects were pointed out.

At first sight, this came across as language learning, but I am not sure this is the right interpretation. Irene didn’t claim that Alex’s talking amounted to speaking in the linguistic sense. But of course, the labeling of objects is very much part of language, and we should not forget that once upon a time linguists defined language simply as symbolic communication. Only when apes proved capable of such communication did they feel the need to raise the bar and add refinements such as that language requires syntax and recursivity. Language acquisition by animals became a huge topic that drew enormous public interest. It was as if all questions about animal intelligence boiled down to a sort of Turing test: can we, humans, hold a sensible conversation with them? Language is such a marker of humanity that an eighteenth-century French bishop was ready to baptize an ape provided he could speak. It surely was all that science seemed to care about in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in attempts to talk with dolphins and teach language to a multitude of primates. Some of this attention turned sour, however, when the American psychologist Herbert Terrace, in 1979, published a highly skeptical article about the sign-language capacities of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee named after American linguist Noam Chomsky.
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Terrace found Nim a boring conversationalist. The vast majority of his utterances were requests for desirable outcomes, such as food, rather than expressions of thoughts, opinions, or ideas. Terrace’s surprise at this was by itself rather surprising, however, given his reliance on operant conditioning. Since this is not how we teach children language, one wonders why it was used for an ape. Having been rewarded thousands of times for hand signals, why wouldn’t Nim use these signals to obtain rewards? He simply did what he was taught. As a result of this project, however, the voices pro and contra animal language were getting louder by the day. To find a bird voice among this cacophony threw many people off, because while apes obviously don’t talk, Alex carefully pronounced every word. Superficially, his behavior resembled language more than that of any other animal, even if there was little agreement about what it actually meant.

Irene’s choice of species was intriguing since Doctor Dolittle, the central character of a series of children’s books, owned an African gray, named Polynesia, who taught the good doctor the language of animals. Irene had always been attracted to these stories and as a child already presented her pet budgie with a drawer full of buttons to see how the bird would arrange them.
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Her work with Alex grew straight out of her early captivation with birds and their taste in colors and shapes. But before discussing her research further, let me briefly dwell on the desire to talk with animals—a desire often expressed by scientists working on animal cognition—as it relates to the deeper connection often assumed between cognition and language.

Oddly enough, this particular desire must have passed me by, because I have never felt it. I am not waiting to hear what my animals have to say about themselves, taking the rather Wittgensteinian position that their message might not be all that enlightening. Even with respect to my fellow humans, I am dubious that language tells us what is going on in their heads. I am surrounded by colleagues who study members of our species by presenting them with questionnaires. They trust the answers they receive and have ways, they assure me, of checking their veracity. But who says that what people tell us about themselves reveals actual emotions and motivations?

This may be true for simple attitudes free from moralizations (“What is your favorite music?”), but it seems almost pointless to ask people about their love life, eating habits, or treatment of others (“Are you pleasant to work with?”). It is far too easy to invent post hoc reasons for one’s behavior, to be silent about one’s sexual habits, to downplay excessive eating or drinking, or to present oneself as more admirable than one really is. No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess, or being a jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a psychologist who writes down everything they say? In one study, female college students reported more sex partners when they were hooked up to a fake lie-detector machine than without it, thus demonstrating that they had been lying before.
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I am in fact relieved to work with subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.

Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices. Am I a man without a conscience, or do I—as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once famously said about herself—think in pictures? Moreover, which language are we talking about? Speaking two languages at home and a third one at work, my thinking must be awfully muddled. Yet I have never noticed any effect, despite the widespread assumption that language is at the root of human thought. In his 1973 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, tellingly entitled “Thoughtless Brutes,” the American philosopher Norman Malcolm stated that “the relationship between language and thought must be so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may
not
have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals
may
have thoughts.”
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Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we may be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn’t it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It’s not that we don’t know what we thought or felt, but we just can’t put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we’d expect a waterfall of words! It is now widely accepted that, even though language assists human thinking by providing categories and concepts, it is not the stuff of thought. We don’t actually need language in order to think. The Swiss pioneer of cognitive development, Jean Piaget, most certainly was not ready to deny thought to preverbal children, which is why he declared cognition to be independent of language. With animals, the situation is similar. As the chief architect of the modern concept of mind, the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, put it: “The obvious (and I should have thought sufficient) refutation of the claim that natural languages are the medium of thought is that there are non-verbal organisms that think.”
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What irony: we have traveled all the way from the absence of language as an argument against thought in other species to the position that the manifest thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language. While I won’t complain about this turn of events, it owes a great debt to language studies on animals such as Alex: not so much because these studies demonstrated language per se but because they helped expose animal thought in a format that we easily relate to. We see a sharp-looking bird, who replies when spoken to, pronouncing object names with great accuracy. He faces a tray full of objects, some made of wool, some of wood, some of plastic, representing all colors of the rainbow. He is invited to feel every object with his beak and tongue, and then, after they have all been returned to the tray, he is asked what the two-cornered blue object is made of. By correctly answering “wool,” he combines his knowledge of color, shape, and material with his memory of what this particular item felt like. Or he sees two keys, one made of green plastic, the other of metal, and is asked “what is different?” He says “color.” Asked “which color bigger,” he answers “green.”
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Anyone watching Alex perform, as I did in the early stages of his career, is blown away. Obviously, skeptics tried to ascribe his skills to rote learning, but since the stimuli changed all the time as did the questions asked, it is hard to see how he could have performed at this level based on stock answers. He would have needed a gigantic memory to handle all possibilities, so much so that it is in fact simpler to assume, as Irene did, that he had acquired a few basic concepts and was capable of mentally combining them. Furthermore, he didn’t need Irene’s presence to answer, nor did he even need to see the actual items. In the absence of any corn, he might be asked what color corn is and would say “yellow.” Particularly impressive was Alex’s ability to distinguish “same” from “different,” which required him to compare objects on a variety of dimensions. All these capacities—labeling, comparing, and judging color, shape, and material—were assumed to require language at the time that Alex began his training. It was an aggravating struggle for Irene to convince the world of his skills, especially since skepticism with respect to birds ran so much deeper than it ever was for our close relatives, the primates. After years of persistence and solid data, however, she had the satisfaction of seeing Alex turn into a celebrity. Upon his death in 2007, he was honored with obituaries in both
The New York Times
and
The Economist
.

In the meantime some of his relatives had begun to impress as well. Another African gray not only mimicked sounds but added accompanying body movements. He’d say “Ciao” while waving goodbye with a foot or wing, or say “Look at my tongue” while sticking out his tongue, just as his owner had shown him. It remained a puzzle how a bird was able to draw such parallels between the human body and its own.
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Then there was Figaro, a Goffin’s cockatoo who was seen breaking off large splinters from a wooden beam in order to rake in nuts placed outside his aviary. Before Figaro, there had been no reports of toolmaking parrots.
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It makes me wonder if Kohts ever conducted similar experiments on her cockatoo, macaw, and ara. Given her keen interest in tools and her six untranslated books, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about it one day. There is obviously still much to discover, as also became clear from tests of Alex’s counting abilities.