Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(30)

Nadia Ladygina-Kohts was a pioneer in animal cognition, who studied not only primates but also parrots, such as this macaw. Working in Moscow at around the same time that K?hler conducted his research, she remains far less known.

My own fascination with this unsung hero’s work took me to Moscow, too. I received a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, where I leafed through private picture albums. Kohts was (and is) much beloved in her country, where she is widely recognized as the great scientist that she was. My biggest surprise was to learn that she owned at least three large parrots. Pictures show her accepting an object handed to her by a cockatoo, and her holding out a tray with three cups toward a macaw. The parrots would sit opposite her, on a table, while Kohts held a small food reward in one hand and a pencil in the other, scoring their choices as she tested their ability to discriminate among objects. I checked with our contemporary expert on Psittaciformes, the American psychologist Irene Pepperberg, but she had never heard of Kohts’s parrot studies. I doubt that anyone in the West ever suspected that bird cognition, too, was studied in Russia well before it became more widely known.


Alex the Parrot

I first met Alex, the African gray that Irene raised and studied for three decades, on visits to her department from a nearby university. Irene had bought the bird in a pet store, in 1977, and was setting up an ambitious project that would open the public eye to the avian mind. It ended up paving the way for all subsequent studies of bird intelligence, because until then the general opinion had been that bird brains simply don’t support advanced cognition. Due to their lack of much of anything that looks like a mammalian cortex, birds were viewed as well endowed with instincts yet poor at learning, let alone thinking. Despite the fact that their brains can be quite sizable—the African gray’s is the size of a shelled walnut, with a large area that functions like a cerebral cortex—and that their natural behavior offers ample reason to question the low opinion of them, the different brain organization of birds has been held against them.

Having myself kept and studied jackdaws—members of that other large-brained bird family, the corvids—I have never had any doubt about their behavioral flexibility. On walks through the park, my birds would tease dogs by flying right in front of their heads, just out of reach of their snapping mouths, to the surprise and chagrin of the dog owners. Indoors, they would play object hiding with me: I would hide a small item, such as a cork, under a pillow or behind a flower pot, while they would try to find it, or vice versa. This game relied on the well-known food-caching talents of crows and jays but also suggested object permanence: the understanding that an object continues to exist even after it has disappeared from view. The extreme playfulness of my jackdaws hinted, as it does with animals in general, at high intelligence and the thrill of a challenge. Visiting Irene, I was quite prepared to be impressed by a bird, therefore, and Alex did not disappoint. Cockily sitting on his perch, he had begun to learn labels for items such as keys, triangles, and squares, saying “key,” “three-corner,” or “four-corner” whenever these objects were pointed out.

At first sight, this came across as language learning, but I am not sure this is the right interpretation. Irene didn’t claim that Alex’s talking amounted to speaking in the linguistic sense. But of course, the labeling of objects is very much part of language, and we should not forget that once upon a time linguists defined language simply as symbolic communication. Only when apes proved capable of such communication did they feel the need to raise the bar and add refinements such as that language requires syntax and recursivity. Language acquisition by animals became a huge topic that drew enormous public interest. It was as if all questions about animal intelligence boiled down to a sort of Turing test: can we, humans, hold a sensible conversation with them? Language is such a marker of humanity that an eighteenth-century French bishop was ready to baptize an ape provided he could speak. It surely was all that science seemed to care about in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in attempts to talk with dolphins and teach language to a multitude of primates. Some of this attention turned sour, however, when the American psychologist Herbert Terrace, in 1979, published a highly skeptical article about the sign-language capacities of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee named after American linguist Noam Chomsky.3

Terrace found Nim a boring conversationalist. The vast majority of his utterances were requests for desirable outcomes, such as food, rather than expressions of thoughts, opinions, or ideas. Terrace’s surprise at this was by itself rather surprising, however, given his reliance on operant conditioning. Since this is not how we teach children language, one wonders why it was used for an ape. Having been rewarded thousands of times for hand signals, why wouldn’t Nim use these signals to obtain rewards? He simply did what he was taught. As a result of this project, however, the voices pro and contra animal language were getting louder by the day. To find a bird voice among this cacophony threw many people off, because while apes obviously don’t talk, Alex carefully pronounced every word. Superficially, his behavior resembled language more than that of any other animal, even if there was little agreement about what it actually meant.

Irene’s choice of species was intriguing since Doctor Dolittle, the central character of a series of children’s books, owned an African gray, named Polynesia, who taught the good doctor the language of animals. Irene had always been attracted to these stories and as a child already presented her pet budgie with a drawer full of buttons to see how the bird would arrange them.4 Her work with Alex grew straight out of her early captivation with birds and their taste in colors and shapes. But before discussing her research further, let me briefly dwell on the desire to talk with animals—a desire often expressed by scientists working on animal cognition—as it relates to the deeper connection often assumed between cognition and language.