Chimpanzees Beat out Children in Reasoning Test 663
caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children. While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness. It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."
This is nothing new... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever work for the Military? As much as I respect those serving you have to wonder about some of the regs they have to live by. If you've worked as a contractor (or served) then you know what I mean
Re:This is nothing new... (Score:4, Insightful)
These were adult chimpanzees, yes? And comparing them to young humans?
I'm sure if you compared young chimpanzees with young humans the results might be different.
Human survival trait (Score:5, Insightful)
When my windows box crashes, I reboot it, without knowing why. I could probably eliminate some steps between boot, crash, and reboot too...
Understandable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Previous Experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What kind of kids? (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually -live- in a fairly isolated part of the South, and dear -god-, that is the stuff of annoying television shows. (Oh, and Alabama, but they don't count). That sort of annoyance only resides in places like Opp, Paxton, Ensley, Florala, Red Level, and Florabama.
Ever heard of 'em? Nope. It's because they still don't have cell phone service. And don't have malls.
-grumbles about people making Southerners out to be 100% backwards, useless, stupid, annoying people, when we're actually only about 75% backwards-
This is just stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it teaches us that there are some real morons at the university level wasting money that could be going to a WORTHY project.
This reminds me of the study a few years back when the attempted to discover why hot pizza burns the roof of your mouth.
Interesting, but accurate? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've seen fairly irrelevant procedures in many tasks that exist for safety reasons. Weapons handling in the military is certainly an example of this and when it comes to such matters its not simple imitation. These involve a LOT of practice to get it just right and even then you have to keep it up to really maintain efficient drill on a weapon.
These tasks were simpler by far, however many would accept that the person showing the step is doing so for a reason. Trust is probably something that affects how we learn as well?
psychology not learning (Score:4, Insightful)
Children are told to do things all the time- they are punished if they don't do them exactly as asked. Kids are encouraged to conform and do what they are asked.
It has very little to do with learning or the ability to think abstractly and more with whether we are discouraged from thinking abstractly by our society. If we all thought for ourselves in the US we would be in much better shape. However a good portion of people let the church do their thinking.
Imitation is flattery.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wal*Mart Kids (Score:5, Insightful)
You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you. It may be one thing to say, "I'd beat my kid until they'd learn to be quiet," but that practice just DOESNT work. It causes a whole host of problems within the child including insecure attachment, mental scarring, and the justification of the use of aggression to solve problems. Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves? From that angle it is completely different, right?
Not to say that the mother was acting appropriately. Parenting lesson #1, use the minimal level of force needed to immediately stop misbehavior, whether this threatening time out or physically restraining the child. That does not include physical abuse. The reason this works is because of a wonderful little thing called cognitive dissonance. When you stop behavior, the child then has time to analyze what he has done and will come to the point where his opinion of himself as good contrasts with his bad actions, causing discomfort. He therefor has to relieve this. If you use violence on the child, he relieves this by a process called overjustification, and ends up devaluing the consequences of his behavior, and will continue doing it once you walk away. If you stop the behavior mildly, then the child will be forced to reevaluate his own internal mindset, and behaviorally change will result. Some of you are already saying "That will not work on a 5 year old," but it does. Children learn these things incredibly early on.
Anyway, guys, please stop this whole beating the child thing. It's not cute, it's not macho, and it's not good parental advice. There are so many ills within our society already that we don't need people going around and blatently advocating the advancement of another one.
Language (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A little bit biased, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Language (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that continuously we prove to ourselves that while apes can't reason, think or act on a human adult level, they are able to do so on a level above or equal the human child/mentally handicaped adult. And yet, we continue to deny them equal rights to children/retards. It says a lot about our society on the whole I think.
Mod all beaters down -1 retarded (Score:2, Insightful)
Spanking, the rod, and the belt are tools of dickweeds who don't care enough about parenting to learn how to do it right. And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. My six year old's grammar, spelling and punctuation is better than yours. So are his manners.
Effect may not immediately follow cause (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it - usually, when an ape wants to obtain food, it only needs to complete a couple of steps to achieve that goal, and the reward is immediate. But with tool-using humans, it may involve sharpening a rock, cutting a big stick, jamming the rock in the end of the stick, and then hunting for food and killing it with the tool. Even if the manufacture of the spear immediately precedes hunting for the animal, the reward is still not instant, and it may even be beneficial to manufacture several spears the day before.
Children see the manufacture of these tools, and the manufacture of the spear becomes the apparent goal, not the killing of the animal. Since the benefit of each step in terms of its effect on the fitness of the tool isn't immediately apparent, it's more advantageous to imitate all of the steps until one gains the higher insight needed to modify the tool's design. There may thus have been a pressure to select for children who were good at imitation when the immediate reward was simply the completion of the task and not the reward that comes from later using the tool.
And when you think about it, nearly everything we do today (aside from fairly passive activities like watching TV, sleeping, taking a dump) doesn't have an immediate reward, yet we usually feel good about completing a task whose actual benefit isn't immediate.
Re:This is just stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you hate science? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what's your point? This study highlighted some profound (and somewhat surprising) differences between humans and one of our closest relatives. Such differences may have some bearing on how humans evolved the ability to develop a complex, linguistic culture based on rigorous imitation. You wouldn't be against learning about evolution, would you?
I know, I know; when you say WORTHY project, you probably mean something dire like cancer or AIDS research. And I wholeheartedly agree that those are worthy projects needing generous funding. But science is science. This study adds to what we know about stuff. That's justification in and of itself. And who's to say this research won't tell us something new about mirror neurons [slashdot.org] (probably necessary for imitation) and, by extension, autism, hm?
Re:This is just stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but children will become adults (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Experiment Proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
But people pretty much grok that humans can be pretty violent.
The delusion that needs shattering is that chimpanzees are cuddly little furballs.
Do as your told. (Score:1, Insightful)
I bet the chimp never was told to do something a specific way "because it's how we do things around here", when it's obviously a silly way of doing it. A chimp who found an easier way to do something would be some kind of hero. A first grade math pupil who found out how to use a calculator would be in trouble.
Re:This is just stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Experiment Proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
i never claimed that chimps are completely harmless, but how many human beings do u think have been killed by chimps in the history of man? now, how many human beings have been killed by the actions of another human being in, say, the last 6 months?
sure, chimps can kill a human being, so can a rotweiller. but more people each year probably die from eating cheese burgers than they do being attacked by these animals. even animals people percieve as being vicious and predatory like alligators or bears rarely attack human beings unprovoked. sure, there may be instances where they do attack people unprovoked, but that hardly makes their entire species vicious killing machines, especially considering the atrocities that human beings are responsible for on a daily basis.
i was just trying to give you a little perspective as i think your pecieved threat of chimpanzees seems to be a bit overexaggerated just as some people's percieved harmlessness of certain wildlife species may be overexaggerated as well.
Re:chimps & sign language (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, is it possible to prove that human children don't speak for the same reasons? I don't think so. Think about it, when a baby is learning to speak, we heap attention and treats on them.
Not really. Babies don't usually get any tangible reward simply for saying a word or two. They may get some attention, but they could get that far more effectively just by crying. Language is only really useful to a baby once it's developed to a significant extent. There are some cultures where babies are more or less ignored until they're able to keep up a decent conversation, but those babies still learn their native language just fine (despite not being rewarded for speaking to any significant extent).
Exactly what it is possible to teach bonobos is an open question -- just as it is an open question what it is possible to teach humans. The point is that human language isn't taught. You don't need to devise elaborate reward schemata to get a human baby to learn a natural language.
Re:but children will become adults (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:chimps & sign language (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of humans that aren't capable of learning grammar without instruction.
Erm, no. What we're talking about here is the notion of "grammar" in linguistics. This is the knowledge that people have which allows them to construct sentences, not the sort of prescriptive rules you're taught in school (don't split inifinitives, etc.) Only a small number of people with specific mental disabilities are unable to aquire the grammar of their native language.
For almost every question and "debunking" of ape speach, it hinges on a question that can't be answered for humans.
It does? Human babies learn languages very easily, eventually aquiring an enormous vocabulary and a mastery of sophisticated grammatical rules, often without much in the way of explicit instruction or training. Apes don't, even if you try to set up ideal conditions for them to do so.
It's funny (Score:2, Insightful)
A gorilla is stronger than just about any human out there. An ape can fall from a much higher distance than a human without getting seriously hurt. The list of things goes on where humans arn't necessarily the best at everything. When it comes to brain development, it may take a bit of time for a human to develop, but look at the differences between an adult of each species, not between adults and children of different species.
Re:chimps & sign language (Score:3, Insightful)
Such scales are defined as "anything that animals don't do is human". Genie didn't develop language and never learned, even with instruction and therapy, grammar beyond what signing chimpanzees can demonstrate, not that her case is scientific in any way.
There is no standard for measuring intelligence. There isn't even a useful scientific definition of the *word*. There are lots of attempts at categorizing and approximating it, every single one of which is subjective and has enormous margins of error and inconsistencies even when applied to regular, "normal" humans, much less when we attempt to apply the same principles to animals or feral humans. We can measure the distances between neutrons more accurately than we can even define human intelligence.
Re:Wal*Mart Kids (Score:3, Insightful)
From your limited "riddle", we can't know. What we do know is that the schoolyard bully is not being disciplined effectively. Often, children don't respond the same way to punishment that the parent does. Where spanking might have been the best disciplining tool for the parent, sometimes the child is disciplined best (and learns to behave best) by something like time-out. For me personally, if my father expressed disappointment in me, that was the worst punishment I could get. Corporal punishment does not make bad kids. Ineffective discipline makes bad kids.
For the schoolyard bully, it's very possible that he is beaten senseless at home for no perceptible reason (from his perspective) on a regular basis, and so is therefore conditioned to believe that pain and violence are natural, normal parts of social interaction. It's also possible that this schoolyard bully is raised by a parent who is inconsistent with discipline. The schoolyard bully could very possibly be manipulating his single mother with elaborate "i'm sorry" speeches, tears, and sniffling, and avoiding punishment at home altogether. If a child is not raised under clear, strict rules (and I'm not talking "strict" in the sense of "arbitrarily restrictive," I mean it as "firm and unyielding"), the child will learn that they can behave however they want, and use their social interaction skills to manipulate their way out of a punishment. As an example, consider a three-year-old boy that thrives on social interaction. Spankings just don't work on him (and I know a boy like this). If his parents tell him to stop misbehaving once, twice, three times, and he keeps on misbehaving, he should receive a punishment, right? Right. Now, if the parents are not strict about the punishment (e.g. he cries and says that he'll be good when they try to put him in time-out, and his parents yield to his bargain), he will continue to misbehave. If the parents use an ineffective discipline method (for this particular boy, spankings, which just make him act up even more), he will, again, continue misbehaving. If the child receives punishment without a clear explanation of why he received that punishment, he will, yet again, continue misbehaving.
Corporal punishment is not evil. The Biblical principle of "Spare the rod, spoil the child [biblegateway.com]" is not wrong. If you don't punish your child for inappropriate behavior, they WILL grow up rotten. What is wrong is dealing with children without significant emotional restraint on the part of the parent or caregiver. Regardless of how upset you are as a parent, you are never, NEVER to use punishment on a child (corporal or not) for any purpose other than to discipline the child and bring him or her to appropriate behavior. If you punish a child in anger, you teach him to react in anger. If you punish a child calmly, with a clear intent, you will teach the child self-control. There is nothing wrong, in teaching, to swat a child's hand as punishment for pulling the cat's tail. It's okay to give a child a spanking for hitting his sibling and making her cry. However, it's NOT okay to swat the living daylights out of his bottom because he's pushing your buttons and frustrating you (which, by the way, will happen. That's why two-parent households are so important). It's NOT okay to punish a child over and over again without making it clear why the punishment is being administered. The right way goes like this:
"Why are you in time-out?"
"Because I told mommy 'no' w
Re:Experiment Proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
I did wonder how the chimps would behave if they were shown the steps by a *boss chimp* -- would they then be more likely to "do as they're told" rather than making things easier for themselves by skipping needless steps?
[puts on pro dog trainer hat] Dogs also shortcut stuff. Dogs that are accustomed to doing their own thing will drop needless steps. But the more desire to please and/or early training they have, the more likely they are to do stuff exactly as they were shown, even when they know of an easier route.
OTOH, cats seldom do shortcuts, except by accident, but cats are much more pattern-driven than dogs.