Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA20862 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 8 Nov 2000 14:34:25 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745AEC@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Tests show a human side to chimps Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 14:32:13 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Thanks for this Wade,
A very similar story ran in New Scientist a few weeks back.
Interesting stuff. It seems to me that the question isn't an either/or,
i.e. either chimps have a theory of mind or they don't, rather it's a
question of degree of sophistication.
A recent documentary series in the UK traced the history of money, and as is
the wont of programmes (and researchers) these days, it began at an
evolutionary level, showing experiments to test to see if chimps have a
concept of exchange value, or bartering.
It seems to me that what matters is humans' capacity to invest objects with
multiple meanings, even meaning entirely unrelated to objects' substance.
Money is an obvious example (especially modern money where the material
value is minimal). The chimps are probably seeing bananas or dart guns in
terms of equating them with actual functions or effects (bananas= taste
nice, eat when hungry; dart-guns= painful, feel bad afterwards). What they
don't appear able to do, in the studies I'm aware of (at a very general
level), is make the kinds of associations that humans do in terms of the
symbolic meaning of objects. Since that symbolic meaning isn't,
necessarily, related to any attributes of the object itself, it can vary-
wildly, rapidly, persistently. Still this is all very much a semiotics kind
of argument, the broader point I suppose is that chimps can have a theory of
mind that doesn't preclude the different nature of human's theory of mind.
Interestingly though, what's really at stake in such research is precisely
this question of human "uniqueness", some wanting to hang onto it whatever,
others not really caring but that's what underlies it for many, not whether
or not chimps really have a theory of mind; IMHO, of course.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Wade T.Smith
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2000 1:49 pm
> To: skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu; memetics list
> Subject: Fwd: Tests show a human side to chimps
>
> Tests show a human side to chimps
>
> By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff, 11/7/2000
>
> http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/312/science/Tests_show_a_human_side_to_c
> h
> imps+.shtml
>
> Chimpanzees do many striking things that make them seem almost human in
> their intelligence, such as building clever tools from sticks. But they
> can also seem strangely dense, such as begging for food from someone who
> has a bucket on their head and can't even see them.
>
> Comparative psychologists have long held that only humans have what is
> called a theory of mind, the ability to imagine the world from the point
> of view of another. This conceptual sophistication - the reason we
> understand a blindfolded man cannot see us, or why we might cry during a
> movie - is one of the great boundaries between us and the other animals.
>
> But now, in two new papers for the journal Animal Behavior, Harvard
> graduate student Brian Hare and his colleagues describe a set of
> experiments suggesting that chimpanzees, too, are able to consider life
> walking with someone else's paws. The papers, one published in June and
> another to be published soon, showed that, when something important such
> as food is on the line, chimps are keenly aware of what their rivals are
> thinking.
>
> ''This suggests that they are aware of what one another can or cannot
> see,'' said Hare, whose research showed that a chimp is more likely to
> charge in and grab a banana if he knows the local bully hasn't seen the
> fruit, too. ''It is the strongest indication yet that chimpanzees have a
> theory of mind.''
>
> The last four decades of research into our closest living relatives has
> been a narrative of falling boundaries. First, in the 1960s, researchers
> found that humans are not the only ones to use tools. Then chimps were
> found making tools, stripping the leaves off of a twig so it can be used
> to fish for termites. By the 1980s, researchers had come to accept that
> chimpanzees can learn abstract symbols and combine them to form sentences.
>
> At every step, the results were greeted with enormous public enthusiasm
> inspiring, for example, ''The Planet of the Apes'' movies, and encouraged
> researchers to view other primates in ever-more human terms.
>
> Now, though, researchers say that the quest to forge a bond with them
> has, ironically, obscured our ability to see their true abilities. In the
> Animal Behavior papers, for example, the breakthrough came not from
> observing how chimpanzees can be trained to interact with humans, but
> from observing, in a carefully controlled way, how they compete for food,
> a behavior that is much closer to the wild.
>
> ''This is the revolution that's happening in the field,'' said Marc
> Hauser, a Harvard professor who does cognitive research with monkeys.
> ''Many of our laboratory experiments now depend on observations from the
> field. We are more sensitive to the ecological and social conditions the
> animals live in.''
>
> Sally Boysen, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, has
> used a similar approach to test her chimps' reactions to a predatory
> event:
>
> A chimp named Darrell was allowed to see a lab worker hiding behind a
> barrier with a tranquilizer gun. Another chimp, named Kermit, was then
> brought to the entrance of the cage.
>
> In one case, where Darrell knew that Kermit could see the worker with the
> gun, he was quiet. But if Kermit could not see the worker, Darrell
> exhibited ''the whole range of stress responses'' to warn Kermit,
> including a ''fear grimace,'' a ''bipedal swagger,'' and ''high-pitched
> distress screams.''
>
> ''Kermit turned right around and left,'' said Boysen, whose results have
> not been published. ''He never even entered the cage.''
>
> But researchers have also found that chimpanzees can be surprisingly
> unsophisticated about the perspective of another. Daniel Povinelli, a
> professor of cognitive science at the University of Louisiana, said that
> he found chimpanzees would beg for food from researchers even when they
> had a bucket over their head.
>
> The chimps, he explained, often play with the buckets and even put them
> over their heads, so one would expect them to understand that the
> researcher would be blind to their begging. The fact that they don't,
> Povinelli argued, demonstrates the limits of chimp intelligence.
>
> But the Animal Behavior experiments, Harvard's Hare said, took advantage
> of the chimps natural competitiveness. All of them were conducted with a
> dominant chimp at one end of a line of cages, and a subordinate one at
> the other end. In each case, they wanted to see if subordinates would
> change their behavior based on what the dominant one knew.
>
> In the first experiment, researchers placed two bananas in the center,
> with a small barrier that blocked one piece of fruit from the view of the
> dominant one.
>
> With a small head start, the subordinate chimp tended to go after the
> obscured one, even though both bananas looked the same from where he sat.
>
> In the second experiment, both were allowed to see a banana as it was
> hidden. The experimenters then found that the subordinate one was more
> likely to grab the food if they replaced the dominant chimp with one who
> did not know the location of the food.
>
> The two experiments were done by Hare and Josep Call and Michael
> Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
> Leipzig, Germany. Bryan Agnetta, of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research
> Center at Emory University, was also a co-author of the first paper.
>
> In humans, the ability to understand that someone else thinks, and may
> think the wrong things, is an essential cognitive building block that
> forms before preschool age.
>
> It allows humans to make the kinds of subtle and complex social
> calculations that order our daily life, and even fuel soap operas: Will
> he believe my explanation if he finds out that I didn't invite him to the
> party of my friend who doesn't like him?
>
> In looking for the origins of this ability, researchers have turned to
> chimpanzees, with whom we are thought to have shared a common ancestor
> between 4 and 6 million years ago.
>
> But it's an effort that must move with care, said Povinelli, who has
> published a new book, called ''Folk Physics for Apes,'' which argues that
> researchers have been too quick to ascribe cognitive sophistication to
> chimpanzees, when there are simpler explanations for the behaviors.
>
> ''It's part of what makes these experiments difficult,'' Povinelli said.
> ''It's part of the nature of the human mind to transform things into
> mental beings. We re-create them in our own image.''
>
> This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 11/7/2000. © Copyright
> 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
>
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