The Fully Conscious Ape

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh,Elizabeth Pugh,Sabatien Lingomo,Itai Roffman

doi:10.46867/ijcp.2018.31.03.03

Abstract

Duane Rumbaugh was one of the first primatologists of the modern era (which began after WWII), to engage in comparative studies of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates. In fact, it was Rumbaugh who drew the world's attention to the Order Primates and who helped initiate the International Primatological Society, IPS, the first academic society to be organized around an Order rather than a discipline. His work eventually led in two directions, first the development of the Transfer Index, a was completely new way of looking at learning. The TI seperated monkeys from apes as completely as did Gallup's mirror task. From this arose the Primate Test Battery, a video based system to test cognitive skills across a wide range of tasks from memory to numerical skils in primates. The other direction was to look at language and its effect on cognition. Only Apes succeeded in the laguage tasks. With Lana's success arose a raft of critiques that - in the light of more recent findings about the structure of human language, are now rendered invalid. Rumbaugh's initial findings in all domains has remained sound. This includes fundamental differences between monkeys and apes in their capacity to spontaneously begin control their attention, to consciously monitor their own behavior, and then to alter it deliberately, or by their own choice. It is the ape's conscious capacity to control its attention and to conciously monitor outcomes in a cause/effect manner, that allows for the acquisition of langauge. This also allows for the creation of "personal self", as a being that exists apart from the current experience of the self. Language greatly assists the emergence of this ability in apes, as does early rearing in which the ape is carried but not seperated from its mother. This allows pointing and joint reference to appear far ahead of schedule and for the spontaneouls development of human language in cross-species co-reared apes. The presence of a wild-reared mother (not present in other captive environments)also allows for the emergence of a nonhuman form of vocal language. The implications of this work for future investigations of apes are discussed.

Highlights

15 Recently, it has become politically correct to declare all apes “dangerous.” Steve Ross of the Brookfield Zoo informs us in the pages of National Geographic (Hu, 2018) that “chimps just sit around and think of ways to kill people.”
Unless all utterances during training and testing were recorded on a computer, one could never determine the truth Rumbaugh argued. (What he did not even suspect at that time was that apes could learn language even without training.) Terrace raised similar questions, but, unlike Rumbaugh, Terrance ventured his conclusions in advance of his studies: Only humans were capable of language
A) Is an object present? B) Is the object a food? C) Is the food in the machine?. They were allowed access to a significant portion of Lana’s data through their model because Rumbaugh provided it upon request. They found that the vast majority of Lana’s utterances (91%) were stock sentences

Summary

Introduction

It requires the ability to alter behavior in rapidly changing situations by consciously monitoring both the incoming stimuli as well as what the “reflected self” or the “imagined self” is doing/thinking at the same time.5 Real world examples of the inability of monkeys and baboons to self-direct their attention are provided below 6 to illustrate that this difference in the self-control of attention has real A sound, or an event of some sort occurs, 7 The strong and consistent difference in the control over attentional awareness between monkeys and apes as described here does not reflect any attempt to equate the rearing conditions across species.

Results

Conclusion