Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA17604 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:29:28 GMT Subject: Fwd: Thinking Like a Chimp Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:26:03 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20001116142444.AAA5410@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Thinking Like a Chimp
by Rabiya S. Tuma
Posted November 10, 2000 Issue 90
http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/90/notes/feature2
Abstract
Researchers have long used the behavior of nonhuman animals to find clues
about human cognition. Daniel J. Povinelli's studies suggest that humans
may be unique in their possession of a mental awareness. His work also
highlights the difficulties and controversies that arise when studying
how an animal thinks.
So your friend talks to his car like it is a sentient being? Don't be
alarmed. According to Daniel J. Povinelli at the University of
Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center, you are just witnessing a
uniquely human result of evolution. After spending the last decade
studying chimpanzee cognition, Povinelli is convinced that humans and
their closest living relatives have very different minds. "Humans
constantly invoke unobservable phenomena and variables to explain why
certain things are happening," says Povinelli. "Chimps operate in the
world of concrete, tangible things that can be seen. The content of their
minds is about the observable world."
The desire to understand animal cognition, particularly that of animals
resembling ourselves, has a long tradition behind it. Charles Darwin
concluded that if an animal's behavior is nearly identical to ours, then
the mental activity supporting that behavior will also be very similar.
But just because an animal behaves like us, does that really mean that
similar mental activity drives their behavior? Povinelli isn't so sure.
But then he is something of an exception in a field that has long
emphasized the similarities shared by chimps and humans, and has given
little airtime to the differences.
Certainly there is no doubt that chimps are intelligent animals that
interact flexibly with their environment. But how similar are the minds
of chimps and humans?
To get at the answer, comparative psychologists and anthropologists
design simple experiments, often set up like games, to test whether
chimpanzees are aware of their own thoughts and those of others. After
all, awareness of thought is a hallmark of human cognition.
In one such experiment, Povinelli's group tested whether or not the
chimps understood the concept of seeing. Chimps regularly use information
gathered through sight, but the question is, Do they think about seeing
or know about others' experiences of seeing?
The experiment is relatively simple and relies on chimpanzees' natural
begging gesture. When a chimp wants something, it stretches out its hand,
palm up, to the person or chimp with the desired object, be it a piece of
food or a toy. In the experiment, the chimp enters a room and is
confronted with two experimenters with food. One experimenter has a
blindfold over his eyes and the other one doesn't; obviously, the
experimenter with his eyes covered can't see the chimp enter the room or
its request for the food. Povinelli reasoned that if the chimps
understood the concept of seeing, then they would only ask for the food
from the experimenter who could see them. But in numerous trials, and in
variations on this theme, the chimpanzees did not discriminate between
the two experimenters, begging equally often from the experimenter who
could not see them.
Povinelli's interpretation of these data is that chimps don't think about
seeing or about what others see. Other researchers aren't so sure. For
example, Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, thinks the data could be interpreted
differently. "If you go to the street and you ask people, 'What is the
part of your eye that allows you to see? Is it the retina? Is it the
eyeball? Is it the iris?', some people," he points out, "will not know
what part of the eye allows you to see. That does not mean that they do
not know anything about seeing." Similarly, he thinks Povinelli's
blindfold experiment tests more about whether a chimp knows which part of
the anatomy is necessary for seeing than about whether the animal thinks
about seeing.
This difference in interpretation highlights what is so intractable about
the field of chimpanzee cognition: How do you ask how a nonverbal animal
thinks when it can't tell you? Testing what it thinks about is relatively
easy, but is it aware of its own mental states?
In all known cultures, Povinelli points out, humans constantly evaluate
their interactions with others in terms of unobservable emotions, desires
and beliefs, asking questions such as "What is she thinking? Why did he
do that? Was he angry? Or did she believe such and such was true?" to
explain the observable actions.
But Povinelli has yet to find evidence that chimps use this sort of
abstract thinking about unobservable things, and he thinks that this sort
of mental awareness is uniquely human.
"I think, based on a lot of empirical research that we have done," says
Povinelli, "that humans and chimps share a common set of low-level
psychological operations that drive most of our behavior. But during the
course of human evolution, we wove in alongside those ancient neural and
psychological systems - in parallel to them - an additional, more
abstract and conscious way of representing those behaviors and thinking
about those behaviors. That more abstract way of thinking about the world
appeals to such unobservable things as beliefs and desires, intentions,
goals, and internal unobservable emotions to explain why the social world
is behaving the way it is, why people behave the way they do.
"I think it is intimately tied up with the evolution of our language
capacities," concludes Povinelli. "The representational capacities that
underwrite language can support this kind of abstract reasoning
capability."
If Povinelli is right that this sort of abstract thinking about the world
around us is the instinctual result of evolution, then trying to discern
how another type of mind, such as the chimp's, conceptualizes the world
forces researchers to challenge their own evolution. In order to discover
and describe how another type of mind works - one that doesn't use
abstractions - the researcher has to check the involuntary attribution of
emotions and logic to the chimp's actions.
"It is very difficult to shut down our human way of thinking about the
world and step into the mind of another species," says Povinelli. Yet if
researchers want to understand how another species thinks, then they must
find another way to conceptualize thought.
The instinctual attribution of emotion to other animals, and even to
inanimate objects like your friend's car, might also explain why
cognition researchers have focused so much on the similarities between
chimpanzees and humans. It is, after all, easier to assume that what is
happening in our minds is what is happening in the mind of an animal that
looks and behaves so much like us.
But Povinelli emphasizes that, in the end, all of the reproducible data
about chimp cognition needs to be accounted for within a single
theoretical framework. And although he stands out in his view that humans
are uniquely cognizant of their emotions and thoughts, he is convinced
that this is the only theory that will accommodate all of the data. After
all, he concludes, "In every critical juncture, after the chimp has
learned something and we gave him the option to tell us, 'are you really
reasoning about seeing or are you using some surface behavior cue?', at
every case, they have consistently said, 'What are you talking about? We
are using what is there. We're using what is in the world.'"
Rabiya S. Tuma is a freelance science writer based in Oregon and New York.
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