Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(11)

The task was just not up to their intellectual level.


The Hunger Games

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them. With the above two playful apes, I opted for tedium to explain their underperformance, but how to be sure? It takes human ingenuity indeed to know how smart an animal is.

It also takes respect. If we test animals under duress, what can we expect? Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet the Morris Water Maze is a standard memory test used every day in hundreds of laboratories that make rats frantically swim in a water tank with high walls until they come upon a submerged platform that saves them. In subsequent trials, the rats need to remember the platform’s location. There is also the Columbia Obstruction Method, in which animals have to cross an electrified grid after varying periods of deprivation, so researchers can see if their drive to reach food or a mate (or for mother rats, their pups) exceeds the fear of a painful shock. Stress is, in fact, a major testing tool. Many labs keep their animals at 85 percent of typical body weight to ensure food motivation. We have woefully little data on how hunger affects their cognition, although I do remember a paper entitled “Too Hungry to Learn?” about food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5

The assumption that an empty stomach improves learning is curious. Think about your own life: absorbing the layout of a city, getting to know new friends, learning to play the piano or do your job. Does food play much of a role? No one has ever proposed permanent food deprivation for university students. Why would it be any different for animals? Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior. Harlow added this sarcastic gem: “I am not for one moment disparaging the value of the rat as a subject for psychological investigation; there is very little wrong with the rat that cannot be overcome by the education of the experimenters.”6

I was amazed to learn that the nearly century-old Yerkes Primate Center went through an early period in which it tested food deprivation on chimpanzees. In the early years, the center was still located in Orange Park, Florida, before it moved to Atlanta, where it became a major institute for biomedical and behavioral neuroscience research. While still in Florida, in 1955, the center set up an operant conditioning program modeled on procedures with rats, including a drastic reduction in body weight and the replacement of chimp names with numbers. Treating apes as rats proved no success, however. Due to the gigantic tensions this program engendered, it lasted only two years. The director and most of the staff deplored the fasting imposed on their apes and constantly argued with the hard-nosed behaviorists who claimed that this was the only way to give the apes “purpose in life,” as they blithely called it. Expressing no interest in cognition—the existence of which they didn’t even acknowledge—they investigated reinforcement schedules and the punitive effect of time-outs. Rumor had it that staff sabotaged their project by secretly feeding the apes at night. Feeling unwelcome and unappreciated, the behaviorists left because, as Skinner later put it, “tender-hearted colleagues frustrated [their] efforts to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation.”7 Nowadays, we would recognize the friction as about not just methodology but also ethics. That creating morose, grumpy apes through starvation was unnecessary was clear from one of the behaviorists’ own attempts with an alternative incentive. Chimpanzee number 141, as he called him, successfully learned a task after each correct choice was rewarded with an opportunity to groom the experimenter’s arm.8

The difference between behaviorism and ethology has always been one of human-controlled versus natural behavior. Behaviorists sought to dictate behavior by placing animals in barren environments in which they could do little else than what the experimenter wanted. If they didn’t, their behavior was classified as “misbehavior.” Raccoons, for example, are almost impossible to train to drop coins into a box, because they prefer to hold on to them and frantically rub them together—a perfectly normal foraging behavior for this species.9 Skinner had no eye for such natural proclivities, however, and preferred a language of control and domination. He spoke of behavioral engineering and manipulation, and not just in relation to animals. Later in life he sought to turn humans into happy, productive, and “maximally effective” citizens.10 While there is no doubt that operant conditioning is a solid and valuable idea and a powerful modifier of behavior, behaviorism’s big mistake was to declare it the only game in town.

Ethologists, on the other hand, are more interested in spontaneous behavior. The first ones were eighteenth-century Frenchmen, who already used the label ethology, derived from the Greek ethos, “character,” to refer to the study of species-typical characteristics. In 1902 the great American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of “habits and instincts.”11 Ethologists did conduct experiments and were not averse to working with captive animals, but still a world of difference lay between Lorenz calling his jackdaws down from the sky or being followed by a gaggle of waddling goslings and Skinner standing before rows of cages with singly housed pigeons, firmly closing his hand around the wings of one of his birds.