Aping around at the National Zoo
Aping around at the National Zoo
November 2011
Over at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park, “aping around” is more than just an expression. At the Think Tank exhibit, part of the Ape Mind Initiative, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences Francys Subiaul and his student interns are researching how primates, including human children, learn from others using computer-based games as well as specially-designed problem-boxes and tools.
Subiaul’s team—which includes over ten undergraduates, two graduate students, and two post-doctoral fellows representing the areas of anthropology, psychology, and speech and hearing sciences— have designed a set of tasks, including an extensive battery of computer games using touch-screen technology. Apes and human children between the ages of two and four are given a set of tasks in which they are asked to recognize and order a series of images. By observing their behavior, the researchers are capturing information about learning ability in both species.
“The way orangutans and humans learn by trial and error is very similar, more similar than I expected,” said Subiaul. “However kids blow the orangutans out of the water when you change the assignment from an individual learning task of trial and error to an imitation task in which you show them the order beforehand and ask them to repeat it.”
While apes, even after a year-and-a-half of training, are not able to demonstrate imitation learning well, kids as young as two-and-a-half are more robust learners and are able to imitate a task on the first try.
“Imitation is something that’s fundamentally different between humans and non-human primates,” said Subiaul. “Humans learn with an incredible facility that other animals do not.”
Subiaul’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, which awarded him a five-year, $440,870 grant for his work on the evolution of cultural learning. Now in its third year, the study includes research on nearly 2,000 children, as well as the zoo’s orangutan population. Some of this work has been recently published in PLOS One and Developmental Psychology. (Other studies are under review in Animal Cognition and the Journal of Comparative Psychology.) The findings from these studies may impact applications for understanding and treating autism and help inform medical models for human disorders that affect language.
“Our research with the apes tells us what the mind can do without language helping us name and organize things” explained Subiaul.
Through another NSF grant, Subiaul is developing a new research paradigm with infants using eye-tracker technology known as “gaze-click,” which is able to record how infants learn simply by using gaze fixations. The technology is similar to the touch screens Subiaul’s team currently uses with the young children at the zoo, but gaze-click tracks the participants’ eye blinks or gaze fixation responses to the computer screen.
“Using this gaze-click technology, infants—who cannot speak or coordinate responses on a touch-screen—can tell us what they choose to look at, giving us insights into their thinking,” said Subiaul. “It’s totally unchartered territory, so it’s difficult, but we’re finding children as young as three months can sustain attention long enough to make responses using their eyes in this paradigm.”
The new study is still in its early stages and researchers are now in the process of recruiting more infants from birth to 18 months of age to participate in the program. Subiaul also plans to conduct gaze-click experiments on the apes and build on the results of his work at the National Zoo.
To learn more about Subiaul and his research and view a video about his work, visit http://www.subiaul.com/.
