Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (33 page)

But this is not the whole explanation of how animals cope with delayed gratification, and why they preen themselves or yawn. There are cognitive interpretations, too. Long ago the father of American psychology, William James, proposed “will” and “ego strength” as the basis of self-control. This is how the behavior of children usually is interpreted, as in the following description of the marshmallow test: “The subject can wait most stoically if he expects that he really will get the deferred larger outcome in the waiting paradigm, and wants it very much, but shifts his attention elsewhere and occupies himself internally with cognitive distractions.”
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The emphasis here is on a deliberate, conscious strategy. The child knows what the future holds and wills his mind off the temptation in front of him. Given how similarly children and some animals behave under the same conditions, it is logical to favor the same explanation. Demonstrating impressive willpower, animals too may be aware of their own desires and try to curb them.

To explore this further, I visited Michael Beran, an American colleague at Georgia State University. Mike works at a lab in a large stretch of forest in Decatur, in the middle of the Atlanta area, with roomy accommodations for chimpanzees and monkeys. It is known as the Language Research Center, so named since Kanzi, the symbol-trained bonobo, was its first resident. At the same location, Charlie Menzel conducts tests of spatial memory on apes and Sarah Brosnan studies economic decision making by capuchins. The Atlanta area may well have the world’s highest concentration of primatologists, since they are also found at Zoo Atlanta, in nearby Athens, Georgia, and of course at the Yerkes Primate Center, which historically sparked all this interest. As a result, we have expertise on a wide range of topics.

I asked Mike, who has worked extensively on self-control,
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why articles in this field so often start out with the connection to consciousness, then quickly move to actual behavior without ever returning to the issue of consciousness. Are the authors teasing us? The reason, Mike felt, is that the link with consciousness is rather speculative. Strictly speaking, the fact that animals achieve a better outcome by waiting doesn’t prove that they realize what will happen in the time ahead. On the other hand, their response doesn’t depend on gradual learning, since they generally show it right away. This is why Mike regards self-control decisions as being future-oriented and cognitive. We may not have proof beyond all doubt, but the assumption is that the apes make these decisions based on the anticipation of a better outcome: “To argue that the behavior of apes is entirely under external stimulus control is silly to me.”

Another argument for a cognitive interpretation is their behavior during long waits, which last up to twenty minutes, while candies drop at regular intervals into a bowl. The waiting apes like to play with things during this time, which suggests recognition that they need self-control. Mike described some of the weird things they do to keep themselves busy. Sherman (an adult male chimpanzee) would pick up a candy from the bowl, inspect it, then put it back. Or Panzee would disconnect the tube through which the candies roll in. She’d look at it and shake it before putting it back onto the dispenser. Given toys, they would use them as a distraction to make the wait easier. Such behavior hints at anticipation and strategizing, both of which suggest conscious awareness.

Mike’s interest in this topic was triggered by a legendary experiment on reversal pointing by the American primatologist Sarah Boysen with Sheba, a chimpanzee. Sheba was asked to choose between two cups with different amounts of candy. The catch, however, was that the cup that she’d point at would go to another chimp, leaving her with the alternative cup. Obviously, the smart strategy would be for Sheba to reverse her pointing, indicating the cup with the
smaller
number of candies. Yet unable to overcome her desire for the fuller cup, she never learned to do so. When the candies were replaced by numbers, however, things changed. Sheba had learned the numbers 1 through 9, knowing the amounts of food associated with them. Presented with two different numbers, she never hesitated to point at the smaller one, showing that she understood how the reversals worked.
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Mike was impressed by Sally’s research showing that chimps can’t get the reversal right with actual candies. This was obviously a matter of self-control. When he tried the same test on his own chimps, they didn’t pass either. Sally’s idea to replace the candies with numbers was brilliant. Whether it is the symbolizing or just the removal of the hedonic property, chimps trained with numerals were really good at it. When I asked if the same had ever been tried with children, Mike’s answer reflected the deep concern of students of animal cognition with fair comparisons: “It may have been tried, I don’t recall, but they probably explained it to the kids, and I would prefer that nothing is explained. We can’t explain it to the apes either.”

Know What You Know

The claim that only humans can mentally hop onto the time train, leaving all other species stranded on the platform, is tied to the fact that we consciously access past and future. Anything related to consciousness has been hard to accept in other species. But this reluctance is problematic: not because we know so much more about consciousness, but because we have growing evidence in other species for episodic memory, future planning, and delayed gratification. Either we abandon the idea that these capacities require consciousness, or we accept the possibility that animals may have it, too.

The fourth spoke on this wheel is
metacognition
, which is literally cognition about cognition, also known as “thinking about thinking.” When the contestants in a game show are allowed to pick their topic, they obviously name the one they are most familiar with. This is metacognition in action, because it means they know what they know. In the same way, I may answer a question by saying “Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue!” In other words, I suspect that I know the answer, even though it’s taking me time to recall it. A student raising her hand in class in reaction to a question is also relying on metacognition, because she only does so if she thinks she knows the solution. Metacognition rests on an executive function in the brain that allows one to monitor one’s own memory. Again, we associate these processes with consciousness, which is exactly why metacognition, too, was deemed unique to our species.

Animal research in this area began perhaps with the
uncertainty response
noticed by Tolman in the 1920s. His rats seemed to hesitate before a difficult task as reflected in their “lookings or runnings back and forth.”
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This was most remarkable, since at the time animals were thought to simply respond to stimuli. Absent an inner life, why be in turmoil about a decision? Decades later the American psychologist David Smith gave a bottlenose dolphin the task to tell the difference between high and low tones. The dolphin was an eighteen-year-old male named Natua, in a pool at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida. As in Tolman’s rats, Natua’s level of confidence was quite manifest. He swam at different speeds toward the response, depending on how easy or hard it was to tell both tones apart. When they were very different, the dolphin arrived with such speed that his bow wave threatened to soak the electronics of the apparatus. They had to be covered with plastic. If the tones were similar, though, Natua slowed down, waggled his head, and wavered between the two paddles that he needed to touch in order to indicate a high or low sound. He didn’t know which one to pick. Smith decided to make a study of Natua’s uncertainty, mindful of Tolman’s suggestion that it might reflect consciousness. The investigator created a way for the animal to opt out. A third paddle was added, which Natua could touch if he wanted a fresh trial with an easier distinction. The tougher the choice, the more Natua went for the third paddle, apparently realizing when he had trouble coming up with the right answer. Thus the field of animal metacognition was born.
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Investigators have essentially followed two approaches. One is to explore the uncertainty response, as in the dolphin study, while the other is to see if animals realize when they need more information. The first approach has been successful with rats and macaques. Robert Hampton, now a colleague at Emory University, gave monkeys a memory task on a touchscreen. They would first see one particular image, say a pink flower, then face a delay before being presented with several pictures, including the pink flower. The delay varied in length. Before each test, the monkeys had the choice to either take it or decline it. If they took the test and correctly touched the pink flower, they gained a peanut. But if they declined, they only got a monkey pellet, a boring everyday food. The longer the delay, the more the monkeys declined taking the test despite its better reward. They seemed to realize that their memory had faded. Occasionally, they were forced to take a trial without a chance of escape. In those cases they fared rather poorly. In other words, they opted out for a reason, doing so when they couldn’t count on their memory.
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A similar test with rats gave similar results: the rats performed best on tests that they had deliberately chosen to take.
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In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.

A rhesus macaque knows that food has been hidden in one of four tubes, but he has no idea which one. He is not allowed to try every tube and will get only one pick. By bending down to first peek into the tubes, he demonstrates that he knows he doesn’t know, which is a sign of metacognition.

The second approach concerns information seeking. For example, jays placed at peepholes were given an opportunity to watch food—waxworms—being hidden before they were allowed to enter the area to find it. They could look through one peephole to see an experimenter put a waxworm in one of four open cups, or they could look through another to see another experimenter with three covered cups plus one open one. In the second case, it was obvious where the worm would end up. Before entering the area to find the worm, the birds spent more time watching the first experimenter. They seemed to realize that this was the information they needed most.
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In monkeys and apes, the same sort of test has been done by having them watch an experimenter hide food in one of several horizontal pipes. Obviously, the primates remembered where he had put the food and confidently selected the correct pipe. If the food hiding had taken place in secret, however, they were not sure which pipe to pick. They peeked into the pipes, bending down to get a good look, before selecting one. They realized that they needed more information to succeed.
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As a result of these studies, some animals are now believed to track their own knowledge and to realize when it is deficient. It all fits Tolman’s insistence that animals are active processors of the cues around them, with beliefs, expectations, perhaps even consciousness. This viewpoint being on the rise, I asked my colleague Rob Hampton about the state of affairs in this field. The two of us have offices on the same floor of Emory’s psychology department. While sitting in mine, we first watched the video of Lisala carrying her huge rock. Like a real scientist, Rob immediately began to imagine how to turn this situation into a controlled experiment by varying the locations of the nuts and the tools, even though for me the beauty of the whole sequence was Lisala’s spontaneity. We had nothing to do with it. Rob was impressed.

I asked him if his work on metacognition had been inspired by the dolphin study, but he rather saw this as a case of convergent interests. The dolphin study did come out first, but it wasn’t about memory, which was Rob’s focus. He was inspired by the ideas of Alastair Inman, a postdoc in Sara Shettleworth’s Toronto lab, where Rob worked at the time. Alastair wondered about the cost of memorizing things. What is the price of holding information in mind? He set up an experiment on pigeon memory that was similar to the metacognition test for monkeys that Rob developed.
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When I asked what he thought of people who draw a sharp line between humans and other animals, such as Endel Tulving’s shifting definitions, Rob exclaimed: “Tulving! He loves to do that. He has done a great service to the animal research community.” Tulving says those things, Rob believes, because he thinks it’s fun to set a high bar. He knows that others will go after it, so he pushes them to come up with clever experiments. In his first monkey paper, Rob thanked Tulving for his “incitement.” Meeting the senior scientist not long thereafter at a conference, Tulving told Rob, “I have seen what you wrote, thank you!”

For Rob, the big question in relation to consciousness is why we actually need it. What is it good for? After all, there are lots of things we can do unconsciously. For example, amnesic patients are able to learn without knowing what they have learned. They may learn to make inverse drawings guided by a mirror. They acquire the hand-eye coordination at about the same rate as any other person, but every time you test them, they’ll tell you that they’ve never done it before. It is all new to them. In their behavior, though, it is obvious that they have experience with the task and have acquired the required skill.