Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (17 page)

Since Kanzi lived for years in Atlanta, I met him multiple times and was always impressed by how well he grasped spoken English. What struck me was not his self-produced utterances—which were rather basic, certainly below the level of a three-year-old child—but the way he reacted to those by the people around him. In one videotaped exchange, Sue asks him “Put the key in the refrigerator,” while she wears a welding mask to prevent Clever Hans Effects. Kanzi picks up a chain of keys, opens the fridge, and puts the keys into it. Asked to give his doggy a shot, he picks up a plastic syringe and injects it into his stuffed toy dog. Kanzi’s passive comprehension is greatly helped by his familiarity with a large number of items and words. This has been tested by playing spoken words to him through headphones while he sits at a table and selects a picture of the object that he hears being mentioned. But that he is excellent at word recognition still doesn’t explain why Kanzi appears to understand entire sentences.

Such understanding is something I also know of my own apes despite the fact that none of them have had language training. Georgia is a naughty chimpanzee prone to furtively collecting water from the faucet so as to spray unsuspecting visitors. Once I told her, in Dutch, while pointing a finger at her, that I had seen her. Immediately, she let the water run from her mouth, apparently realizing that there was no point trying to surprise us. But how did she know what I had said? My suspicion is that many apes know a few key words and are highly sensitive to contextual information, such as our tone of voice, glances, and gestures. After all, Georgia had just collected a mouthful of water, and I was giving a range of clues, such as pointing a finger at her and calling her by name. Without necessarily following my exact words, she had the cognitive talent to piece together what I probably meant.

When apes guess correctly, we get the distinct impression that they must have understood everything we said, but their understanding may be more fragmentary. A striking illustration was given by Robert Yerkes after an interaction with Chimpita, a young male chimpanzee:

I was feeding grapes to Chimpita one day and he swallowed the seeds. I told him he must give the seeds to me, for I was afraid they might cause appendicitis, so he gave me all the seeds he had in his mouth and then picked up some from the floor with his lips and his hands. Finally, there were two left between the cage wall and the cement floor which he could not get well with either lips or fingers. I said to him “Chimpita, when I have gone you will eat those seeds.” He looked at me as if he asked why I bothered him so much. Then he went into the next cage, looking at me all the while, got a little stick, and with it poked the seeds out of the crack and gave them to me.
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It is easy to think that Chimpita must have understood the whole sentence, which is why an astonished Yerkes added, “Such behavior demands careful scientific analysis.” But more likely, the ape was following the scientist’s body language more closely than we are used to. I regularly have this eerie impression that apes look right through me, perhaps because they are not distracted by language. By directing our attention to what others have to say, we neglect body language compared to animals, for whom it is all they have to go by. It is a skill they employ every day and have refined to the point that they read us like a book. It reminds me of a story by Oliver Sacks about a group of patients in an aphasia ward who were convulsed with laughter during a televised speech by President Ronald Reagan.
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Incapable of understanding words as such, aphasia patients follow what is being said through facial expressions and body language. They are so attentive to nonverbal cues that they cannot be lied to. Sacks concluded that the president, whose speech seemed perfectly normal to others around, so cunningly combined deceptive words and tone of voice that only the brain-damaged were able to see through it.

The immense effort to find language outside our own species has, ironically, led to a greater appreciation of how special the language capacity is. It is fed by specific learning mechanisms that allow a toddler to linguistically outpace any trained animal. It is in fact an excellent example of biologically prepared learning in our species. Yet this realization by no means invalidates the revelations we owe animal language research. That would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It has given us Alex, Washoe, Kanzi, and other prodigies who have helped put animal cognition on the map. These animals convinced skeptics and the general public alike that there is much more to their behavior than rote learning. One cannot watch a parrot successfully count up items in his head and still believe that the only thing these birds are good at is parroting.

To the Dogs

Each in their own way, Irene Pepperberg and Nadia Kohts navigated treacherous waters. It would be great if everyone were open-minded and purely interested in the evidence, but science is not immune to preconceived notions and fanatically held beliefs. Anyone who forbids the study of language origins must be scared of new ideas, as must anyone whose only answer to Mendelian genetics is state persecution. Like Galileo’s colleagues, who refused to peek through his telescope, humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

This was the situation when science got serious about animal cognition. It was an upsetting time for many. The language studies helped kill the reigning incredulity, even if for reasons other than their original intent. With the cognitive genie out of the bottle, it couldn’t be pushed back in, and science began to explore animals through less language-colored glasses. We returned to the ways Kohts, Yerkes, Köhler, and others had conceived their studies, focusing on tools, knowledge of the environment, social relations, insight, foresight, and so on. Many experimental paradigms popular today in studies of cooperation, food sharing, and token exchange go back to research of one century ago.
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Of course, there remains the problem of how to work with hard-to-control creatures, such as the apes, and how to motivate them. If they haven’t grown up around humans, these animals have no clue what our commands mean and don’t pay as much attention to us as we’d like them to. They remain essentially wild and hard to engage. Language-trained animals have been so much easier to deal with that one wonders how we might replace them.

In most cases this is impossible, and we’ll just have to learn how to test wild or semiwild creatures. But there is one exception, which is an animal intentionally bred by our species to get along with us: the dog. Not so long ago, students of animal behavior shied away from dogs precisely because they were domesticated animals, hence genetically modified and artificial. But science is coming around to the dog, recognizing its advantage for studies on intelligence. For one thing, dog researchers don’t need to worry as much about safety or to lock their subjects up in cages. They don’t need to feed or maintain their subjects, since they just ask people to drop by at a convenient time with their pets. They compensate the proud owners with a certificate emblazoned with the seal of their university, which confirms their pooch’s genius. Most of all, investigators don’t face the motivational problems found in most other animals. Dogs eagerly pay attention to us and need little encouragement to work on the tasks that we present to them. No wonder “dognition” is an up-and-coming field.
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In the meantime, we are also learning more about human perceptions of animals. Did you know, for example, that one quarter of dog owners believe their pets to be smarter than most people?
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As an added bonus, the dog is a highly empathic and social creature, so that these studies also illuminate animal emotions, an area Darwin was excited about. He often used dogs to illustrate the emotional continuity among species.

With dogs, we even have the prospect of neuroscience at a level that remains out of reach for most other animals. In our own species, we are used to fMRI scans of the brain in order to see what we are afraid of or how much we love each other. Results of these studies are common fare in the news media. Why aren’t we doing the same with animals? The reason is that humans are prepared to lie still for many minutes inside a giant magnet, which is the only way to get a good image of their brains. We can ask them questions and show them videos and compare their brain’s activity with its resting state. The answers are not always as informative as they are hyped to be, though, because brain imaging often amounts to what I mockingly call
neurogeography
. The typical outcome is a brain map with an area lighted up in yellow or red: it tells us
where
things happen in the brain, but rarely do we hear an explanation of
what
is going on and
why
.
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Apart from this limitation, however, the problem that has vexed science is how to gather the same information on animals. Attempts have been made with birds, but they were not awake during the scanning itself. We also have brain scans of immobilized yet awake marmosets. Put in a scanner swaddled like Mongolian babies, these tiny monkeys were exposed to various scents.
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But for larger primates, such as chimpanzees, to undergo such a procedure—even if it were at all practical, which it is not—would cause so much stress that it would keep them from paying attention to cognitive tasks. We also cannot put them under anesthesia, since this would defeat the whole purpose. The real challenge is to get fully conscious voluntary participation.

To see how this may be done, I descended one day to the basement floor of my own psychology department at Emory University to inspect the new magnet intended for human imaging. One of my colleagues had begun to exploit this fine piece of equipment to achieve a breakthrough with the one animal that can be trained to sit still. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist, joined me in the waiting room with Eli, a large intact male dog, and Callie, a much smaller spayed female. Callie is the hero of Greg’s tale, as she is his own pet, the first dog trained to lie still with her snout in a specially designed holder.

While we waited, the dogs played nicely together in the room, but when it turned into a fight in which Eli drew a drop of blood, we had to separate them. This was surely different from most human waiting rooms. For Callie, it was the eighth time she had received the muttmuffs, or foam-filled ear seals that fit like headphones over a dog’s head to reduce sound, such as the buzzing of the magnet. It is an important part of the project to get the dogs used to odd noises. Strangely enough, Greg was convinced that this might work after seeing a video of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. SEAL Team 6 had a trained dog jump out of a helicopter with an oxygen mask on while strapped to a soldier’s chest. If you can train dogs to do this, Greg thought, we certainly should be able to get them used to the magnet’s noises. This, together with training them to put their heads in a chinrest, is the secret to the project’s success. With lots of little chunks of hotdog, the canines are trained at home so that the chinrest in the magnet is familiar to them and they know what is expected of them.
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Callie in a magnetic resonance scanner. Dogs can be trained to sit still, which permits the study of their cognition through brain imaging, such as fMRI.

The frequent rewards pose a bit of a problem, because eating requires jaw movements, which interfere with brain imaging. Via a special dog ladder, Callie ran into the scanner and took her position waiting for the procedure. She was a bit too excited, though, because her tail wagged wildly, adding another source of body movement. Greg’s joking that we were looking for the tail-wagging area in the brain was not too far off. Eli needed a bit more encouragement to enter the scanner but was convinced once he saw his familiar chinrest. His owner told me that he is so used to it, and associates it with such good times, that she sometimes finds him sleeping at home with his head inside. He remained still for three minutes, long enough for some good scanning.

Pretrained hand signals tell the dog in the scanner whether a treat is forthcoming. This is how Greg studies activation of their pleasure centers. His goals are rather modest at this point, such as to show that similar cognitive processes in humans and dogs engage similar brain areas. Greg is finding that the prospect of food activates the caudate nucleus in the canine brain in the same way that it does in the brain of businessmen anticipating a monetary bonus.
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That all mammalian brains operate in essentially the same way has also been found in other domains. Behind these similarities is a much deeper message, of course. Instead of treating mental processes as a black box, as Skinner and his followers had done, we are now prying open the box to reveal a wealth of neural homologies. These show a shared evolutionary background to mental processes and offer a powerful argument against human-animal dualism.