Polynomial

Someone brought to my attention just the other day, two videos from YouTube, which I have posted below. They are two interesting clips taken from National Geographic’s “Ape Genius” documentary, comparing how a chimpanzee learns when compared with human children…

Please note…

These videos are a dramatic reenactment of an experiment for a TV documentary. The actual experiment criteria:

• The children used ranged from 41-59 months.

• The chimps used ranged from 2-6 y.o. Chimps mature at 13-14 for females, 15-16 for males.

• The box always contains a sticker. When the child gets the sticker, they trade that in for a food reward.

• The child is instructed to get the reward any way they can, then the experimenter leaves the room. The test is filmed. When the child is successful, they say “I have got it!” and the experimenter returns to the room and gives them their reward.

This test demonstrates that the human children, even when given tasks that obviously have no meaning, followed the instructions given to them by the perceived authority figure, whereas the chimpanzees are more pragmatic, and exclude the extraneous steps. This is something human beings are specialists at i.e. following rules. And in many ways it benefits us… Why and how? Because we’re able to perceive rules, understand them, and mimic them extremely well, whether they come from an authority figure OR even if they are simply the rules of “Nature” i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or even complex syntax rules for language development, sentence structure, poetry and stories… Not to mention the learning involved in the back catalog of complex vocabulary.

These videos were recorded from the National Geographic Channel, who’s website can be reached by clicking here.

The original documentary that the study was aired on, entitled “The Human Ape”, can be viewed on YouTube here.

And on the same note… The following article was published in the Times on October 24th 2004.

The research, which will be published this week in the quarterly academic journal Animal Cognition, describes how 12 chimps from a Ugandan nature reserve aged from two to six were pitted against 16 children aged from three to five.

Both groups were given boxes with two compartments. The top compartment was empty, the other contained food for the chimps or stickers for the children. Half the boxes were transparent, the rest opaque.

A researcher lifted the lid on the top of each box and made a stabbing motion with a stick in the empty compartment, as though she was trying to skewer the prize. The demonstration was misleading because the food and stickers could be reached only by opening a flap at the front of the box.

The chimps with the transparent box immediately realised that the stabbing motion was pointless and ignored it. Instead, they opened the flap and took out the food. Those with the opaque box soon reached the same conclusion.

However, all the children continued to stab at the empty compartment. To discount the possibility that the children were trying to please the researchers, they were left alone and filmed secretly. Only a few managed to retrieve a sticker after much futile prodding.

Professor Andrew Whiten, head of the Scottish Primate Research Group at St Andrews, which carried out the study, said this was clear evidence that chimps adopted a more intelligent approach to solving puzzles, even though they might not have the capacity of humans for other skills such as speech.

According to Whiten, a three-year-old chimp from the Congo called Baluku even appeared to understand that he was being tested and enjoyed the challenge.

“The chimps worked out that the stabbing motion was irrelevant, unlike the children. They were more discriminating and didn’t mindlessly copy everything they saw,” he said.

“Children were prone to copy everything, which appears a rather less intelligent approach.

“These findings force us to rethink what’s going on in chimps’ heads. It shows they learn from adults in a sophisticated way and that is evidence of culture in a non-human primate.”

Vicky Horner, who worked on the study, added: “All the children blindly copied everything I did, perhaps because as humans we’re predisposed to copy adults.

“The results were surprising and fascinating. The tests clearly show intelligence among the chimps.”

The team is now planning further tests involving older chimps and children.

Chimpanzees are hominoids along with humans, gorillas, orang-utans and bonobos (pygmy chimps). They are man’s closest living relative, sharing 98.4% of our genes and demonstrating many human characteristics.

The new findings challenge beliefs about the relative development of chimps and humans. Chimps are known to have an initial advantage in the early years, but previously it had been thought that children started to race ahead of them at the age of two.

But the age of the subjects in the St Andrews study suggests the point that children start to develop greater mental powers could be much later.

“What surprises me is the age of the chimps in the study,” said Cyril Rosen, of the International Primate Protection League. “Chimps are born with fully formed skulls while human skulls are softer to enable birth. We would expect them to have comparable mental agility until the age of two. To know that five-year-old chimps are more advanced than children of the same age is surprising.”

The study has encouraged animal campaigners to call for great apes to be given more protection. Each year people in Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia kill and eat thousands of them.

To see the source of this article, please click here.

Subnote: It would be interesting to find out about the cultural significance of the group of children tested i.e. where they predominantly educated in Western methods, which are renowned for extreme mental condtioning, and have been known to discourage free thinking. Or was the cross section of human test subjects taken from a world wide group, with children from various different cultural educational systems?