http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/13401491-418/animal-smarts-what-do-dolphins-and-dogs-know.html
Animal smarts: What do dolphins and dogs know?
By SETH BORENSTEIN
June 25, 2012 2:22PM
In this July 13, 2004 photo,
Natalie Homza is notified by her new hearing dog Arby that her oven
timer is going off during a training exercise in her Shreveport, La.,
home. In recent years, researchers are finding that thought processes in
animals aren't a matter of how closely related they are to humans. You
don't have to be a primate to be smart. (AP Photo/The Shreveport Times,
shreveporttimes.com, Shane Bevel) MAGS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
SHREVEPORTTIMES.COM; NO SALES
The more we study animals, the less special we seem.
Baboons
can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be
able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer
than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They
show empathy. They share.
“It’s not a question of whether they think — it’s how they think,” says Duke University scientist Brian Hare.
Now, scientists wonder if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking.
The evidence that animals are more intelligent and
more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it
comes to primates. It’s an increasingly hot scientific field with the
number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years,
often with better technology and neuroscience paving the way to unusual
discoveries.
This month, scientists mapping the DNA of the
bonobo ape found that, like the chimp, bonobos are only 1.3 percent
different from humans.
Says Josep Call, director of the primate research
center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany: “Every year, we discover
things that we thought they could not do.”
Call says one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes can set goals and follow through with them.
Orangutans and bonobos in a zoo were offered eight
possible tools — two of which would help them get at some food. At times
when they chose the proper tool, researchers moved the apes to a
different area before they could get the food, and then kept them
waiting as much as 14 hours. In nearly every case, when the apes
realized they were being moved, they took their tool with them so they
could use it to get food the next day, remembering that even after
sleeping. The goal and series of tasks didn’t leave the apes’ minds.
Call says this is similar to a person packing
luggage a day before a trip: “For humans it’s such a central ability,
it’s so important.”
For a few years, scientists have watched
chimpanzees in zoos collect and store rocks as weapons for later use. In
May, a study found they even add deception to the mix. They created
haystacks to conceal their stash of stones from opponents, just like
nations do with bombs.
Hare points to studies where competing chimpanzees
enter an arena where one bit of food is hidden from view for only one
chimp. The chimp that can see the hidden food, quickly learns that his
foe can’t see it and uses that to his advantage, displaying the ability
to perceive another ape’s situation. That’s a trait humans develop as
toddlers, but something we thought other animals never got, Hare said.
And then there is the amazing monkey memory.
At the National Zoo in Washington, humans who try
to match their recall skills with an orangutan’s are humbled. Zoo
associate director Don Moore says: “I’ve got a Ph.D., for God’s sake,
you would think I could out-think an orang, and I can’t.”
In French research, at least two baboons kept
memorizing so many pictures — several thousand — that after three years
researchers ran out of time before the baboons reached their limit.
Researcher Joel Fagot at the French National Center for Scientific
Research figured they could memorize at least 10,000 and probably more.
And a chimp in Japan named Ayumu who sees strings
of numbers flash on a screen for a split-second regularly beats humans
at accurately duplicating the lineup. He’s a YouTube sensation, along
with orangutans in a Miami zoo that use iPads.
It’s not just primates that demonstrate surprising
abilities. Dolphins, whose brains are 25 percent heavier than humans,
recognize themselves in a mirror. So do elephants. A study out this
month found that black bears can do primitive counting, something even
pigeons have done, by putting two dots before five, or 10 before 20 in
one experiment.
The trend in research is to identify some new
thinking skill that chimps can do, revealing that certain abilities are
“not uniquely human,” says Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal.
Then the scientists find that same ability in other primates further
removed from humans genetically. Then, they see it in dogs and
elephants.
“Capacities that we think in humans are very
special and complex are probably not so special and not so complex,” de
Waal says. “This research in animals elevates the animals, but it also
brings down the humans.... If monkeys can do it and maybe dogs and other
animals, maybe it’s not as complex as you think.”
At Duke, professor Elizabeth Brannon shows videos
of monkeys that appear to be doing a “fuzzy representation” of
multiplication by following the number of dots that go into a box on a
computer screen and choosing the right answer to come out of the box.
This is after they’ve already done addition and subtraction.
This spring in France, researchers showed that six
baboons could distinguish between fake and real four-letter words — BRRU
vs KITE, for example. And they chose to do these computer-based
exercises of their own free will, either for fun or a snack.
It was once thought the control of emotions and the
ability to empathize and socialize separated us from our primate
cousins. But chimps console, and fight, each other. They also try to
soothe an upset companion, grooming and putting their arms around him.
“I see plenty of empathy in my chimpanzees,” de Waal says.
But studies have shown they also go to war against
neighboring colonies, killing the males and taking the females. That’s
something that also is very human and led people to believe that
war-making must go back in our lineage 6 million years, de Waal says.
When scientists look at our other closest relative,
the bonobo, they see a difference. Bonobos don’t kill. Hare says his
experiments show bonobos give food to newcomer bonobos, even when they
could choose to keep all the food themselves.
One reason scientists are learning more about
animal intellect is computers, including touch screens. In some cases,
scientists are setting up banks of computers available to primates 24-7.
In the French word recognition experiment, Fagot found he got more and
better data when it was the baboons’ choice to work.
Animal cognition researcher Steve Ross at the Lincoln Park Zoo agrees.
“The apes in our case seem to be working better when they have that control, that choice to perform,” says Ross.
Brain scans on monkeys and apes also have helped
correct mistaken views about ape brain power. It was once thought the
prefrontal cortex, the area in charge of higher reasoning, was
disproportionately larger than the rest of the brain only in humans,
giving us a cognitive advantage, Hare says. But imaging shows that
monkey and ape prefrontal cortexes have that same larger scale, he says.
What’s different is that the human communication system in the prefrontal cortex is more complex, Hare says.
So there are limits to what non-human primates can
do. Animals don’t have the ability to communicate with the complexity of
human language. In the French study, the baboons can recognize that the
letters KITE make a word because through trial and error they learn
which letters tend to go together in what order. But the baboons don’t
have a clue of what KITE means. It’s that gap that’s key. “The
boundaries are not as sharp as people think, but there are certain
things you can’t overcome and language is one of them,” says Columbia
University animal cognition researcher Herbert Terrace.
And that leads to another difference, Ross said.
Because apes lack language skills, they learn by watching and mimicking.
Humans teach with language and explanation, which is faster and better,
Ross said.
Some of the shifts in scientific understanding of
animals are leading to ethical debates. When Emory researcher Lori
Marino in 2001 co-wrote a groundbreaking study on dolphins recognizing
themselves in mirrors, proving they have a sense of self similar to
humans, she had a revelation.
“The more you learn about them, the more you
realize that they do have the capacity and characteristics that we think
of as a person,” Marino says. “I think it’s impossible to ignore the
ethical implications of these kinds of findings.”
After the two dolphins she studied died when
transferred to another aquarium, she decided never to work on captive
dolphins again. She then became a science adviser to the Nonhuman Rights
Project, which seeks legal rights or status for animals. The idea,
Marino said, is to get animals such as dolphins “to be deemed a person,
not property.”
The intelligence of primates was one of the factors
behind a report last year by the Institute of Medicine that said the
National Institutes of Health should reduce dramatically the number of
chimpanzees it uses in biomedical research.
The NIH is working on new guidelines that would
further limit federal medical chimpanzee use down from its current few
dozen chimps at any given time, said NIH program planning chief James
Anderson. Chimps are a special case, with their use “very, very
limited,” he said. But he raises the question: “What happens if your
child is sick or your mother is dying” and animal research might lead to
a cure?
The issue is more about animal welfare and giving
them the right “not to be killed, not to be tortured, not to be confined
unnecessarily” than giving them legal standing, says David DeGrazia, a
philosophy and ethics professor at George Washington University.
Hare says that focusing on animal rights ignores
the problem of treatment of chimps in research settings. He contends
that for behavioral studies and even for many medical research tests
they could be kept in zoos or sanctuaries rather than labs.
Animals performing tasks in near-natural habitats
“is like an Ivy League college” for the apes, Hare says. “We’re going to
see them do stunning and sophisticated things.”
AP