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Chimpanzees Beat out Children in Reasoning Test
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."
I don't believe devolved actually works in this case. Technically, evolution is not a directional process, as it is classically defined so really indicating a backwards motion to it doesn't really apply, nor would using evolution as an argument to applying a sense of greater advancement. At its root, the world evolve means to change, thus saying chimps changed in to humans would be the same concept but hold very different connotations than saying evolved.
However, if you were to use devolve as to say: "The chimpanzees devolved a number of their genes to humans." Then technically, devolved would be a proper word.
Demented But Determined.
heh, funny you mention why hot pizza burns your mouth. Most people assume it's the oil/cheese... but it's actually the sauce.
The specific heat of water is much higher than that of oil, which means the oil heats up quicker, but also loses its heat quicker. Top this with the insulating effect the cheese gives the sauce, and the sauce can end up staying overly hot for quite some time.
Anyhoo, im not sure quite why a study of that would be needed, but I for one find looking at it from the angle of specific heat is pretty interesting.
Hrm. Do I go for the:
+1 Funny: Because it's hot. Hot <anything> burns. It doesn't have to be pizza.
Or the:
+1 Informative/Boring: The roof of your mouth is particularly sensitive; it's part of the body's temperature monitors. It's this sensor that triggers brain freeze when you eat something cold. The sensor thinks you're far too cold, and your brain tells blood to rush to your head. The amount of blood is higher than the veins and capillaries can take, and bottlenecks. And it hurts.
Tough call...
Do the chimps worry about disappointing thier parents if they miss a step? Are they worried about being disobedient?
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but as a parent one thing I have come to understand - expecially when they are young, kids are more afraid of disappointing you than death, taxes and making things more efficient.
You point out the overgeneralization of rules (AKA overregularization, the two most common being 's' for pluralization, and use of 'ed' to indicate past tense) as proof that babies aren't paying attention to the adults trying to teach them language, but you missed one of the essential factors of this phenomenon. Before babies overapply these rules, they actually get them right. That is, in the early stages of learning, they say went instead of goed or feet instead of foots. Then, as they learn more and more verbs they also learn (note I didn't say are taught) that there are rules about this sort of thing, and begin overapplying the rules. Eventaully, though, they are taught that there are exceptions to these rules in English and (hopefully) begin to use them correctly again.
So I would say that it's not that babies are ignoring adults when they try to teach language, but rather that babies are paying so much attention all the time that adults are constantly teaching them the language, not just when they're making a concerted effort to teach them.
I seriously doubt you can point to any conclusive, scientific language studies on children that really, definitively, show what level of language development a child would develop on it's own, because such a study would be scandalously immoral and unethical.
) who essentially spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a small bedroom, usually restrained and only rarely hearing words. As is often true of cases like Genie, the course of normal language acquisition has been disrupted, giving researchers and opportunity to see if various theories properly predict what would happen in the abscence of certain events.
And yet there are scandalously immoral and unethical situations that have been studied (though perhaps not scientifically, since there's no control over variables, etc.) Of most recent note is the case of Genie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
And if that isn't disturbing enough, there's a whole website on similar stories (including Genie) at http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php.
Contrary to popular belief, humans actually go through developmental changes over their lives, and these developments directly influence their ability to learn and reason.
i aget.shtml.
A simple example that anybody can relate to is sex. Try to explain sex to a 7 or 8 year old. They don't have the hormones yet, and they simply do not "get it".
Another simple example is that humans do not "learn to walk". It happens as soon as they are strong enough and have the coordination to walk. Just like other animals. Some of which "learn to walk" within minutes of being born.
Piaget was a biologist, turned developmental psychologist. Take a look here http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/p
The children in the study were 3 to 4 years old. To summarize that period according to Piaget:
Preoperational Phase (2-4 years old) Increased use of verbal representation but speech is egocentric. The beginnings of symbolic rather than simple motor play. Transductive reasoning. Can think about something without the object being present by use of language.
Intuitive Phase (4-7 years years old) Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. The child has an intuitive grasp of logical concepts in some areas. However, there is still a tendency to focus attention on one aspect of an object while ignoring others. Concepts formed are crude and irreversible. Easy to believe in magical increase, decrease, disappearance. Reality not firm. Perceptions dominate judgment. In moral-ethical realm, the child is not able to show principles underlying best behavior. Rules of a game not develop, only uses simple do's and don'ts imposed by authority.
This agrees with the parent's assertion that, "In addition to that, human children are conditioned to do exactly what they're told. This will have an influence on things."
This is not to say that Piaget's theories are the end all be all, but I would imagine that no adult would disagree that there are at least some developmental effects on human reasoning. Personally, I can't believe that a spacial puzzle like this was given to 3 and 4 year olds, and reprinted in the New York Times, but oh well.