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."

Comments

Experiment Proposal

[students]

I'd like to see another experiment done. Suppose, hypothetically, that a chimp showed a human child how to solve a puzzle, inserting unnecessary steps. Would the human skip steps more often if taught by a chimp than by another human? If so, it would show that what matters is if the species of the teacher and student are the same, not the what species the student belongs to.

A little bit biased, isn't it?

[ReformedExCon]

Human babies have a prolonged childhood. Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s. So it seems a little disingenuous to compare chimpanzees to human babies when the rates of growth and maturity are so different.

Re:A little bit biased, isn't it?

[ozmanjusri]

politicians seem to have no grasp on cause-and-effect regardless of age.

No, that's just ordinary sociopathic behaviour. Politicians are aware of cause-and-effect, but don't have emotional reactions to the consequences.

You may be right in that being the difference between the children and the chimps though - the child's goal may have been to please the experimenter, while the chimp's goal was to get the prize

Re:Human survival trait

[BewireNomali]

Right. Really good point.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine about religion. She was raised religious, and while an athiest now, she was happy to have been raised religiously. I asked why; she responded that the religious foundation answered questions she would have had (albeit falsely) about God, death, universe, etc. and thus eased her mind about them until she was mature enough to decide that it was mythology to her. In other words, she did exactly as you suggested, emulated a successful culture dynamic too complex for her to understand fully.

We all do it as humans. It's what religion is. Do this because I(tm) said so.

Good point.