Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(35)

The immense effort to find language outside our own species has, ironically, led to a greater appreciation of how special the language capacity is. It is fed by specific learning mechanisms that allow a toddler to linguistically outpace any trained animal. It is in fact an excellent example of biologically prepared learning in our species. Yet this realization by no means invalidates the revelations we owe animal language research. That would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It has given us Alex, Washoe, Kanzi, and other prodigies who have helped put animal cognition on the map. These animals convinced skeptics and the general public alike that there is much more to their behavior than rote learning. One cannot watch a parrot successfully count up items in his head and still believe that the only thing these birds are good at is parroting.


To the Dogs

Each in their own way, Irene Pepperberg and Nadia Kohts navigated treacherous waters. It would be great if everyone were open-minded and purely interested in the evidence, but science is not immune to preconceived notions and fanatically held beliefs. Anyone who forbids the study of language origins must be scared of new ideas, as must anyone whose only answer to Mendelian genetics is state persecution. Like Galileo’s colleagues, who refused to peek through his telescope, humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

This was the situation when science got serious about animal cognition. It was an upsetting time for many. The language studies helped kill the reigning incredulity, even if for reasons other than their original intent. With the cognitive genie out of the bottle, it couldn’t be pushed back in, and science began to explore animals through less language-colored glasses. We returned to the ways Kohts, Yerkes, K?hler, and others had conceived their studies, focusing on tools, knowledge of the environment, social relations, insight, foresight, and so on. Many experimental paradigms popular today in studies of cooperation, food sharing, and token exchange go back to research of one century ago.33 Of course, there remains the problem of how to work with hard-to-control creatures, such as the apes, and how to motivate them. If they haven’t grown up around humans, these animals have no clue what our commands mean and don’t pay as much attention to us as we’d like them to. They remain essentially wild and hard to engage. Language-trained animals have been so much easier to deal with that one wonders how we might replace them.

In most cases this is impossible, and we’ll just have to learn how to test wild or semiwild creatures. But there is one exception, which is an animal intentionally bred by our species to get along with us: the dog. Not so long ago, students of animal behavior shied away from dogs precisely because they were domesticated animals, hence genetically modified and artificial. But science is coming around to the dog, recognizing its advantage for studies on intelligence. For one thing, dog researchers don’t need to worry as much about safety or to lock their subjects up in cages. They don’t need to feed or maintain their subjects, since they just ask people to drop by at a convenient time with their pets. They compensate the proud owners with a certificate emblazoned with the seal of their university, which confirms their pooch’s genius. Most of all, investigators don’t face the motivational problems found in most other animals. Dogs eagerly pay attention to us and need little encouragement to work on the tasks that we present to them. No wonder “dognition” is an up-and-coming field.34 In the meantime, we are also learning more about human perceptions of animals. Did you know, for example, that one quarter of dog owners believe their pets to be smarter than most people?35 As an added bonus, the dog is a highly empathic and social creature, so that these studies also illuminate animal emotions, an area Darwin was excited about. He often used dogs to illustrate the emotional continuity among species.

With dogs, we even have the prospect of neuroscience at a level that remains out of reach for most other animals. In our own species, we are used to fMRI scans of the brain in order to see what we are afraid of or how much we love each other. Results of these studies are common fare in the news media. Why aren’t we doing the same with animals? The reason is that humans are prepared to lie still for many minutes inside a giant magnet, which is the only way to get a good image of their brains. We can ask them questions and show them videos and compare their brain’s activity with its resting state. The answers are not always as informative as they are hyped to be, though, because brain imaging often amounts to what I mockingly call neurogeography. The typical outcome is a brain map with an area lighted up in yellow or red: it tells us where things happen in the brain, but rarely do we hear an explanation of what is going on and why.36

Apart from this limitation, however, the problem that has vexed science is how to gather the same information on animals. Attempts have been made with birds, but they were not awake during the scanning itself. We also have brain scans of immobilized yet awake marmosets. Put in a scanner swaddled like Mongolian babies, these tiny monkeys were exposed to various scents.37 But for larger primates, such as chimpanzees, to undergo such a procedure—even if it were at all practical, which it is not—would cause so much stress that it would keep them from paying attention to cognitive tasks. We also cannot put them under anesthesia, since this would defeat the whole purpose. The real challenge is to get fully conscious voluntary participation.

To see how this may be done, I descended one day to the basement floor of my own psychology department at Emory University to inspect the new magnet intended for human imaging. One of my colleagues had begun to exploit this fine piece of equipment to achieve a breakthrough with the one animal that can be trained to sit still. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist, joined me in the waiting room with Eli, a large intact male dog, and Callie, a much smaller spayed female. Callie is the hero of Greg’s tale, as she is his own pet, the first dog trained to lie still with her snout in a specially designed holder.