Children vs. chimps

Phil writes,

I [Phil] recently read a book called “Becoming a Tiger,” about animal learning. It has lots and lots of short pieces, arranged by theme; light reading, but very informative; includes references if one wanted to follow up.

Perhaps my favorite story is about otters. Back in the 60s (I think it was…might have even been 50s) the received wisdom among animal researchers was that animals learn only by operant conditioning: they do what they’re rewarded for, they don’t do what gets them punished, and that’s it. Anyway, this woman is working with otters. She wants to train it to climb onto a box. She puts a box in its cage, it eventually climbs on, and she gives it a treat. It gets very excited, jumps down, runs around the cage, and gets back up on the box. She gives it another treat. Such thrills! It jumps down, and jumps back on the cage…and this time it stands on only three legs. She gives it a treat anyway. It jumps down, jumps back up, and lies on its back. And so on. It tries variations: putting just its front legs on the box, putting just its back legs on the box, etc.

Later, the researcher tells this story to some visiting scientists. They don’t believe her: “an animal won’t do something that might not get it a reward, if it can do something else that will get it a reward.” She takes them to see her otter. She holds a hoop under water in the otter’s pool. It swims around, looks at it, touches it…and eventually swims through it. She gives it a treat. Excitement! It swims through it again…another treat. It swims through it again, and grabs it out of her hand. No treat. It drops the hoop. She holds it up again. The otter swims through upside down. Treat. Try again, the otter swims through backwards. No treat. And so on. The otter kept on experimenting. One of the visiting researchers said “it takes years for me to train my grad students to be this creative.”

Anyway, the book is full of stories of animals doing amazing things, as you might expect. But it also is full of stories of animals doing mental feats that humans can’t do, which I did not expect. For example, supposedly a common element on human IQ tests is to look at the sketch of an object and pick which of several choices represents the same object viewed from a different angle. Trained pigeons can do this about as well as trained college students, but the pigeons can do it faster.

I think there could be a fun “reality TV” game show based on this. You would select a human team: an artist, an infant, a brainiac college student, and so on. You would have a series of tasks for them to do, and they would get to choose someone to compete in the task. Some of the tasks would be right up their alley…like, you’d have a basketweaver, and presumably the team would pick him to compete in the basketweaving contest, where he has 3 hours to make an artistic basket out of a pile of straw. He can probably do something pretty cool. but the bowerbird is going to kick his ass. You could find someone who is famous for having a great memory, and they might do pretty well burying 200 small objects in a field and coming back a week later to retrieve them…but some kinds of birds can bury literally thousands of nuts and seeds and find them months later, so this is not going to be a contest either. And in the pigeon vs the college kid in the “object rotation” test, the pigeon will have a slight edge.

3 thoughts on “Children vs. chimps

  1. Fox has had a show called "Man vs. Beast" in which humans competed against animals in physical tasks – climbing tree vs. a chimp, tug-of-war vs. a baboon, eating hot dogs vs. bear.

  2. Hadn't heard about the Fox show. Could be interesting, but I think "my" show idea is better: we already know lots of animals are strong and fast and all that, but who knew they could beat us at cognitive skills?

    The dolphin story is nice. It's also mentioned in "Becoming a Tiger"; the author says that in trying to do something new every time, the dolphin pretty quickly had to start doing long strings of aerial acrobatics that, she says, probably were novel but that were so complicated that the trainers couldn't tell what they were doing and thus couldn't confirm that they were new. But the exercise definitely illustrated that some animals can learn the idea that they have to do something novel in order to get a reward.

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