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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."
Chimps will always be chimps.
Lucky bastards.
there's more than one way to do me.
oh, and First Post(though i've probably failed it, i have Karma to burn so do whatever to me)
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
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.
Simon's Rock College
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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
:-)
Ever work for the Military? As much as I respect those serving you have to wonder about some of the regs they have to live by. If you've worked as a contractor (or served) then you know what I mean
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Fully developed chimps beat underdeveloped humans at reasoning?
I'm shocked. Shocked!
Perhaps this is more of a survival trait in humans than a superiority in chimps. Growing up, there were a lot of things I needed to know HOW to do which were too complex for me to understand WHY at the time. Too, I emulate my parents' culture, often without a conscious reason, perhaps because their culture has allowed them to succeed.
When my windows box crashes, I reboot it, without knowing why. I could probably eliminate some steps between boot, crash, and reboot too...
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
since we teach kids process rather than critical thinking. If you want to teach your 2-year-old to tie his shoes, to you teach a series of steps to be followed, rather than an understanding of what qualities a knot must have to hold. I suppose this may be because kids can't handle critical thinking, but this test can't prove it.
I don't think this study shows learning processes as much as the poster says it does.
I think the real key here is communication and culture. The Chimps were 'shown' how to open the box to retrieve the food. The children were also 'shown', and told that they could do whatever they thought neccicary to retreive it.
I would think that upbringing and communication would have a big impact on what the kids will do. Lots of times, when an 'adult' shows a child how to do something, they will take that as the 'correct' way to do it, and not deviate from that - because if there was another way to do it, why would the 'adult' show them incorrectly? Kids that have been taught or had the experiance to question authority would be more likely IMO to skip unneeded steps.
However, a chimp most likely does not have this 'follow what the adult says' mentality, so it seems obvious that they would do whatever is the easiest to get the desired result.
They don't notice the extra steps? But they repeated them the first time they were shown. If you need to invent excuses like this to feel that your species is better than chimps, that's a sign of a very unhealthy and insecure view of self.
It would be interesting to know how much experience the children in this study had had with some form of negative reinforcement for not following a parent/teacher/etc.'s given method exactly.
I believe this study.
(1) I can't disagree much with the mall part, but...
I actually -live- in a fairly isolated part of the South, and dear -god-, that is the stuff of annoying television shows. (Oh, and Alabama, but they don't count). That sort of annoyance only resides in places like Opp, Paxton, Ensley, Florala, Red Level, and Florabama.
Ever heard of 'em? Nope. It's because they still don't have cell phone service. And don't have malls.
-grumbles about people making Southerners out to be 100% backwards, useless, stupid, annoying people, when we're actually only about 75% backwards-
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
Why didn't they compare cats and humans? At 10 weeks kittens can already jump up on tables and wreck things - the kid is just slobbering on the floor. Does this teach us interesting things about how things learn?
No, it teaches us that there are some real morons at the university level wasting money that could be going to a WORTHY project.
This reminds me of the study a few years back when the attempted to discover why hot pizza burns the roof of your mouth.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Could this be a certain amount of social conditioning on the matter. I had heard stories on how North-American children will form into lines naturally because they learned to do so in school, while some countries on the African continent, this is a rare occurrence. In many ways following direction is doing what is expected from a child when given direction from an adult?
I've seen fairly irrelevant procedures in many tasks that exist for safety reasons. Weapons handling in the military is certainly an example of this and when it comes to such matters its not simple imitation. These involve a LOT of practice to get it just right and even then you have to keep it up to really maintain efficient drill on a weapon.
These tasks were simpler by far, however many would accept that the person showing the step is doing so for a reason. Trust is probably something that affects how we learn as well?
Its has to do with sociopsychology- not learning.
Children are told to do things all the time- they are punished if they don't do them exactly as asked. Kids are encouraged to conform and do what they are asked.
It has very little to do with learning or the ability to think abstractly and more with whether we are discouraged from thinking abstractly by our society. If we all thought for ourselves in the US we would be in much better shape. However a good portion of people let the church do their thinking.
The children did the task exactly as it was described because the scientists were authority figures and their parents trained them that way. The chimps don't give a damn.
This view of authority is, however, a double-edged sword and could be dangerous.
Le français vous intéresse?
I never know what scientific results to believe, so I tend to believe the ones that make sense. This theory of human learning makes a lot of sense. We tend to imitate each other even in bizarre behaviors. Remember Furbies? How 'bout our need for voting booths, because our votes may be biased by seeing someone else punch a card the same way? We often don't even think when we imitate something; people can go their whole lives without doing anything original. The human body has a lot of obsolete features, like appendixes. Evolution just doesn't keep up with culture, so though we can wish that people weren't a bunch of copycats, it's hard to expect humans to override a feature of their minds that was once very useful. Expecting originality is a relatively modern innovation. "the dictionary says heretic: a holder of unconventional beliefs. do you know anyone who is not a heretic? i don't." (Paraphrase Don Marquis, "Archy the Cockroach")
...I read the article title as "Chimpanzees Beat Children in Reasoning Test".
I didn't know what sort of a reasoning test involved children and simians to engage in fisticuffs, but I was all for it.
hi mom!
[Disclaimer: I have no credentials in behavioural psychology, aside from what I have learned by reading and by experience as an amateur trainer and caregiver for several dogs, including two German Shepherds.]
Practically from birth, humans are conditioned to imitate each other, so perhaps it's no surprise that the children absorbed and retained the "ritual" portions of the tasks. Psychologists call it operant conditioning: when you reward a certain kind of behaviour, it tends to occur more often; if you don't, then it tends to extinguish. I wonder if chimps are more goal-oriented because their sense of reward is more focused on the final result rather than following a number of ritualized steps, at least initially. In short, perhaps young children are more conditioned to imitate, as well as being more capable of doing so.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Thats because the human already is insane. All humans are insane, but since we control the dictionary, we get to call ourselves sane.
Demented But Determined.
$ook = new Banana.GiveMeBanana();
my $stomach = _FULL_;
my $sound = loudContentedScreech();
throwFeces();
?>
I am scientifically inaccurate.
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.
Yea, yea... "tough love", "save the rod, spoil the child.."
You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you. It may be one thing to say, "I'd beat my kid until they'd learn to be quiet," but that practice just DOESNT work. It causes a whole host of problems within the child including insecure attachment, mental scarring, and the justification of the use of aggression to solve problems. Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves? From that angle it is completely different, right?
Not to say that the mother was acting appropriately. Parenting lesson #1, use the minimal level of force needed to immediately stop misbehavior, whether this threatening time out or physically restraining the child. That does not include physical abuse. The reason this works is because of a wonderful little thing called cognitive dissonance. When you stop behavior, the child then has time to analyze what he has done and will come to the point where his opinion of himself as good contrasts with his bad actions, causing discomfort. He therefor has to relieve this. If you use violence on the child, he relieves this by a process called overjustification, and ends up devaluing the consequences of his behavior, and will continue doing it once you walk away. If you stop the behavior mildly, then the child will be forced to reevaluate his own internal mindset, and behaviorally change will result. Some of you are already saying "That will not work on a 5 year old," but it does. Children learn these things incredibly early on.
Anyway, guys, please stop this whole beating the child thing. It's not cute, it's not macho, and it's not good parental advice. There are so many ills within our society already that we don't need people going around and blatently advocating the advancement of another one.
Seriously man, did Rasmus Lerdorf systematically kill off every one of your remaining family members, or something?
Seriously man. These are all CyricZ PHP trolls from THIS MONTH. I skipped a good 10 that were all on the "PHP5 Recipes" thread, for sanity's sake.
Has it occurred to you that it's not the lack of vocal cords that prevents chimps from communicationg with us?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Now ask a chimp to have a vocabulary of 10,000 words.
Maria Montessori's major insight was that there are "sensitive periods" for various developments -- an age to walk, an age for toilet independence, an age to talk, an age to learn practical life skills, an age to acquire knowledge, an age to self-consciously play a role in human society, and an age to develop a profession. If a person does not learn and develop a skill during the sensitive period, that person will struggle with that skill until death.
Three and four year olds aren't ready to reason. Teach them to read, to sew, and to cook instead.
All i can say about this is that in Steven Pinker's book, 'The Language Instinct' he reckons:
some (behavioural) linguists said they got a bunch of chimps to communicate using sign language. the chimps were using sentences, combining words to build more abstract concepts etc.
they were doing this to try and disprove the ideas of Chomsky and Pinker and people that language is a builtin ability unique and essential to the human brain.
like what you seem to be suggesting above, that chimps lack the ability to make the requisite sounds for speech, but nothing else in the way of thought or language skills.
but:
Pinker and his cohorts reckoned the chimps were not really using language, they imitated some key words, but didn't originate their own, the researchers were very lax about what they accepted as a sign, etc.
they of course had their own agenda to push
but if anyone did do some proper communicating with chimps, i don't know about it.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
No. The problem is lazy-ass parents, one way or the other. Too lazy to apply appropriate discipline consistently, relentlessly, inevitably. You state the bad behavior, you state the consequences, and you apply the consequences. You also explain good behavior, point it out and reward it. But that's hard work. It's so much easier a) let the little terrors run wild, or b) smack them about.
Spanking, the rod, and the belt are tools of dickweeds who don't care enough about parenting to learn how to do it right. And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. My six year old's grammar, spelling and punctuation is better than yours. So are his manners.
Think about it - usually, when an ape wants to obtain food, it only needs to complete a couple of steps to achieve that goal, and the reward is immediate. But with tool-using humans, it may involve sharpening a rock, cutting a big stick, jamming the rock in the end of the stick, and then hunting for food and killing it with the tool. Even if the manufacture of the spear immediately precedes hunting for the animal, the reward is still not instant, and it may even be beneficial to manufacture several spears the day before.
Children see the manufacture of these tools, and the manufacture of the spear becomes the apparent goal, not the killing of the animal. Since the benefit of each step in terms of its effect on the fitness of the tool isn't immediately apparent, it's more advantageous to imitate all of the steps until one gains the higher insight needed to modify the tool's design. There may thus have been a pressure to select for children who were good at imitation when the immediate reward was simply the completion of the task and not the reward that comes from later using the tool.
And when you think about it, nearly everything we do today (aside from fairly passive activities like watching TV, sleeping, taking a dump) doesn't have an immediate reward, yet we usually feel good about completing a task whose actual benefit isn't immediate.
And what's your point? This study highlighted some profound (and somewhat surprising) differences between humans and one of our closest relatives. Such differences may have some bearing on how humans evolved the ability to develop a complex, linguistic culture based on rigorous imitation. You wouldn't be against learning about evolution, would you?
I know, I know; when you say WORTHY project, you probably mean something dire like cancer or AIDS research. And I wholeheartedly agree that those are worthy projects needing generous funding. But science is science. This study adds to what we know about stuff. That's justification in and of itself. And who's to say this research won't tell us something new about mirror neurons (probably necessary for imitation) and, by extension, autism, hm?
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Well, if you're on a vendetta there's no point doing it half-assed I guess.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Don't leave us hangin, man; did they learn why?
I know that that sounds entroniant, perhaps even bleavisome, but it had to be said.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Experiments prove that Gophers are more intelligent than human fetuses...
And the point of the headline?
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
We all know mouse and dolphings are smarter than us, but now chimps? were will this all end? Humans think they are smarter than dolphins for they have things like money, and digital watches. Dolphins think they are smarter for the exact same reasons.
Dont talk to me about life!
I think this comes back to how we raise our children... (Well actually how you raise your children since I'm still one...)
I think that the whole "don't question, just accept" way of thinking is totally absurd.
Do you have any idea how annoying it is to hear "because I said so" or "What do you mean 'Why?' It just is!" from an adult?
What's worse are the "I'll tell you when you're older", "You wouldn't understand", and "You don't want to know that"...
My personal favorite is "It doesn't matter"...
My parents were great; they avoided these types of thought-quashing over-used "no-answers", but many of my teachers (even the good ones) at the elementary school level (USA) got so sick of me (it wasn't just me, but I did ask a lot of questions) asking questions that they decided that 'It doesn't matter' what I want to know, it only matters what the curriculum says to teach (another whole rant), that if the explanation wasn't simple, that they should make something up.
I'm not trying to brag, but even in 1st grade, I was really good at math. I have 3 math teaches in my family, and that helped a bit, but teachers often tell 'little lies' because it doesn't really matter... Do you have any idea how many recesses I sat trying to figure out why you couldn't divide by a fraction or decimal?! I certainly didn't know for sure what you would get, but it only makes sense that if you have 8 marbles and you put them into 2 piles you have 4 in each pile (8/2=4) and then you put them into 1 pile, you would have 8 in each pile (8/1=8) and if you were to keep cutting the number of piles in half, the number of marbles would double, which is true (8/(1/2)=16), but no first grade teacher is going to try to explain the fact that multiplication and division are the same thing when the teacher just spent days trying to teach the kids not to confuse them.
I'm going to go off on [another] tangent... the teachers don't call them little lies; they call them white lies. Does anybody who uses that term have any idea how incredibly racist that is?! It implies that black lies (big lies) are very bad; while white lies aren't so bad...I don't think I need to elaborate any further...
When I started writing this, I was going to give an example from each grade, but now that I'm done with that, and re-read it, I've decided not to bother as 99% of readers will have given up by now...
The other problem with the way kids are taught to reason is you* spend so much time telling kids to do it 'the right way'... in reality, kids are told to do it your way. They are told that their way is always wrong.
-You have to color in the lines. Why? Because I said so.
Is there any reason to make kids color in the lines? Can you think of one? Yes? Why do most parents/teachers/etc. refuse to explain it to their children? Is coloring in the lines a life-skill? No, but it does help to teach motor skills. There are other reasons, but that's the only one that makes any sense to me...
Isn't it more efficient to just scribble?
Isn't it actually stifling creativity to teach kids that you have to color each object one color?
-Walk in a straight line between classes. (Not sure if they do this most places, or if it's just a regional thing)
I can't count the number of times I questioned it in the first year or two, but after being yelled at because I asked so many times, I just kind of accepted it.
(Just for the record, 'It doesn't matter' isn't an acceptable answer when a kid asks a question multiple times. Obviously if they keep asking the question, it matters to them)
Again, I was going to ramble for a bit longer, but I think I've ranted on the school system and on conformity enough for one post...
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.
Considering how much research has gone into research on primates, it's almost funny that it's taken researchers this long to come up with this conclusion. Full grown chimps compared to human children. Ok, so a fully developed chimp is better at some things than a human child. Children need time to grow up. If a young chimp were to beat a human child, THEN there would be something interesting to report.
A gorilla is stronger than just about any human out there. An ape can fall from a much higher distance than a human without getting seriously hurt. The list of things goes on where humans arn't necessarily the best at everything. When it comes to brain development, it may take a bit of time for a human to develop, but look at the differences between an adult of each species, not between adults and children of different species.
Babies don't usually get any tangible reward simply for saying a word or two. They may get some attention, but they could get that far more effectively just by crying. You should never do that. When a baby is starting to speak, you should ignore it most of the time it cries, and give him reward in attention when he speaks; that way, it'll develop speech faster.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you don't do that, they will not start talking for many months. I know of a toddler that started talking at almost 2yo (as opposed to 8-18 months) because everytime the said "ah" and pointed to something, his parents gave it to him.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Here's a little riddle for you: Two kids are on the playground, and one of them is running around, pushing people over, hitting, kicking, etc. The other is playing in the sand with a smaller group of kids, interacting, using social skills such as sharing. Which one of these kids is the one which gets hit with a belt whenever he misbehaves?
From your limited "riddle", we can't know. What we do know is that the schoolyard bully is not being disciplined effectively. Often, children don't respond the same way to punishment that the parent does. Where spanking might have been the best disciplining tool for the parent, sometimes the child is disciplined best (and learns to behave best) by something like time-out. For me personally, if my father expressed disappointment in me, that was the worst punishment I could get. Corporal punishment does not make bad kids. Ineffective discipline makes bad kids.
For the schoolyard bully, it's very possible that he is beaten senseless at home for no perceptible reason (from his perspective) on a regular basis, and so is therefore conditioned to believe that pain and violence are natural, normal parts of social interaction. It's also possible that this schoolyard bully is raised by a parent who is inconsistent with discipline. The schoolyard bully could very possibly be manipulating his single mother with elaborate "i'm sorry" speeches, tears, and sniffling, and avoiding punishment at home altogether. If a child is not raised under clear, strict rules (and I'm not talking "strict" in the sense of "arbitrarily restrictive," I mean it as "firm and unyielding"), the child will learn that they can behave however they want, and use their social interaction skills to manipulate their way out of a punishment. As an example, consider a three-year-old boy that thrives on social interaction. Spankings just don't work on him (and I know a boy like this). If his parents tell him to stop misbehaving once, twice, three times, and he keeps on misbehaving, he should receive a punishment, right? Right. Now, if the parents are not strict about the punishment (e.g. he cries and says that he'll be good when they try to put him in time-out, and his parents yield to his bargain), he will continue to misbehave. If the parents use an ineffective discipline method (for this particular boy, spankings, which just make him act up even more), he will, again, continue misbehaving. If the child receives punishment without a clear explanation of why he received that punishment, he will, yet again, continue misbehaving.
Corporal punishment is not evil. The Biblical principle of "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is not wrong. If you don't punish your child for inappropriate behavior, they WILL grow up rotten. What is wrong is dealing with children without significant emotional restraint on the part of the parent or caregiver. Regardless of how upset you are as a parent, you are never, NEVER to use punishment on a child (corporal or not) for any purpose other than to discipline the child and bring him or her to appropriate behavior. If you punish a child in anger, you teach him to react in anger. If you punish a child calmly, with a clear intent, you will teach the child self-control. There is nothing wrong, in teaching, to swat a child's hand as punishment for pulling the cat's tail. It's okay to give a child a spanking for hitting his sibling and making her cry. However, it's NOT okay to swat the living daylights out of his bottom because he's pushing your buttons and frustrating you (which, by the way, will happen. That's why two-parent households are so important). It's NOT okay to punish a child over and over again without making it clear why the punishment is being administered. The right way goes like this:
"Why are you in time-out?"
"Because I told mommy 'no' w
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic