Forty frequently used body language signals were identified by British researchers who spent nine months observing orangutans in three European zoos. And the results have been compiled into the first ape dictionary - a guide on how our cousins chat to each other in the wild. It shows the apes have at least 25 signals or gestures for 'I want to play', for example - ranging from a back roll and somersault, to a yank of their hair or a bite of the air.
Other clowning gestures for play include placing objects on their heads, playing with their faces and raising their arms. Brushing with a hand means they want something to stop, while embracing and pulling at the same time means they want another ape to walk with them. Other gestures include hitting the ground, swatting, grabbing, and dangling upside down. Although studies of great ape body language have been carried out before, none has focused so closely on the intentional meanings of specific gestures. The findings don't just reveal how apes communicate - they also shed light on the origins of human speech millions of years ago.
Think Tank is a place to think about thinking. It combines the appeal of orangutans, macaques, and other charismatic species with an interactive exploration of the question: "What is thinking?" Think Tank is unique in the zoo world in that it is about a biological process thinking, rather than a particular animal species or habitat.
How can scientists determine when animals are actually thinking? Scientists have different opinions about which animal behaviors actually involve thinking. Thinking, as defined in Think Tank, is said to occur if three elements exist: image, intention, and flexibility. For example, this scenario suggests that thinking is occurring:
A person wanting a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie will have an image of that cookie in his head. With the intention of getting a cookie, he will set out for a bakery. When he gets there, he finds it is closed. Flexibility is shown when he can decide to buy the ingredients, go home, and bake his own cookies. In other words, when Plan A fails, he can switch to Plan B, or even Plan C.
The Orangutan Language Project (OLP) explores the abilities of orangutans to use symbols and syntax to express their thoughts. Demonstrations of language research with the orangutans allow visitors to see scientific investigation in progress. Think Tank is the only place in the world where visitors have free access to observe scientists studying animal cognition.
The orangutans are learning to use a symbol-based language that is presented on a computer monitor. The monitor screen has large "buttons" that are big enough for orangutan fingers. The OLP dictionary contains a total of about 70 symbols. All symbols are abstract and have no visual relation to what they represent. In other words, the symbol for an apple looks nothing like an apple.
There are seven different categories of symbols and each category currently contains ten individual symbols. The symbol categories are:
* non-food objects
* proper names of people
* proper names of orangutans
* Arabic numbers
Each category of symbols has its own specific exterior shape. For example, all food symbols have a rectangular exterior and all non-food object symbols have a circular exterior. A rectangle alone means "food" and a circle alone means "non-food object." Thus, each symbol can be broken down into its component parts just as a words are spelled using a series of letters. Individually, the interior components of each symbol are meaningless (like the letters of a word). It's the arrangement within the exterior shape that gives each symbol a specific meaning. In addition to the seven categories, there are symbols that mean "send," "clear," "yes/good," and "no/wrong."
The OLP dictionary can be expanded to as many symbols as the orangutans can learn. Currently, the orangutans are building their vocabularies. The next step will be to introduce syntax so that the individual symbols can be strung together to form simple sentences.
The orangutans participate in the OLP on a voluntary basis. There are no coercive or disciplinary elements to the program; orangutans are only reinforced with positive rewards. The animals are never coerced into working by being deprived of food, companionship, play time, or anything else.
While a great deal is known about human memory, we know little about how memory works in nonhuman primates. It appears that nonhuman primates rely on memory in such everyday tasks as foraging for food and recognizing familiar individuals. The purpose of this research is to investigate memory in orangutans.
When humans are asked to memorize a list of unrelated words in a series of trials, they begin to organize the words in idiosyncratic clusters. This phenomenon has been termed subjective organization, since the nature of the associations are unique to each person. This spontaneously-developed organization strategy increases the number of words that a person can remember. The crucial parts of this task are that the words are unrelated and that it requires free recall on the part of the person being tested. Unrelated words are necessary to prevent organization based on semantic categories (which we know humans will use). Free recall, in which the person is free to produce the list words in any order, allows the researcher to see what strategies the person used to organize the words.
The purpose of this research project is to explore orangutan self-awareness. Do orangutans recognize themselves? Do they understand that different people see the world in different ways? Those are the questions that this research is trying to answer.
Does an orangutan recognize itself in a mirror? If so, it must have a concept of self. Mirrors were used in studies at the National Zoological Park to test whether orangutans recognize themselves in mirrors. While some definitely do, others seem to treat their reflections as if they were other orangutans.
To study whether orangutans are capable of empathy, we need to be able to identify if an orangutan can use its own experiences to understand that different people view the world in different ways. For example, can an orangutan use its own experience of visual impairment with a blindfold to understand that another individual cannot see when he or she wears a blindfold? Human children don't begin to understand this simple concept until at least the age three or four. The results with the orangutans show that they do understand that other individuals are visually impaired when blindfolded.
Another way orangutan empathy is being studied is to determine whether they can understand the goals and intentions of their caretakers. To test this, a situation is set up in which an orangutan sees a keeper trying to get an object placed just out of reach. The orangutans have access to tools (long sticks) that they previously have been able to use to get out-of-reach objects. If the orangutan helps by giving the keeper a tool, then the animal is obviously able to empathize with the keeper's goals and intentions.
Social interactions may offer some of the strongest evidence of thinking. Survival depends on fulfilling needs, but how does a social animal fulfill the needs of finding resources, safety, and reproduction when other members of the group are all trying to do the same things? The answer is strategic thinking.
Dealing with other individuals in a group can be complicated. Who can be trusted? Who can help? Who is the leader? Many individuals means many social possibilities. When there are multiple ways to achieve a social goal, it is likely that strategic thinking is occurring. To get what you want, planning and flexibility are the keys, and that means thinking.
The Strategic Thinking area of Think Tank considers hierarchies and beneficial relationships. In particular, four different goals of social living are explored:
* How to increase status in society
* How to join forces against a rival
* How to make up after a fight
* How to find a mate
Obtaining these social goals requires answers to several questions:
* Who is each individual (including age and sex) and to whom is each individual related?
* Who is dominant in which situations and who is subordinate in which situations?
* Where are resources located and who has access to them?
* What is your place in the hierarchy?
Once these questions are answered, this information must be used to select a series of behaviors that meet a certain goal.
The Strategic Thinking touch-screen computer in the Society of Think Tank challenges visitors to reach four social goals important to chimpanzees. Visitors roleplay life in a chimpanzee group by touching photos that illustrate certain behaviors.
Deception and innovation are two activities that may provide evidence of thinking. Creating diversions, misinforming, and withholding information are all deceptive acts. In order to label a behavior "deceptive" or "innovative", a scientist must be very familiar with the normal range of behaviors for a particular species.
Deception is not always a behavior that shows thinking. For many species it is part of a feedback loop where a certain stimulus triggers the next activity. For instance, a plover will "fake" an injury to distract a predator away from its nest. This is deception, but all plovers use this same behavior and it is not learned. It shows little flexibility and is therefore not evidence of thinking.
There are good anecdotal examples of behaviors that appear to involve thinking-based deception. For instance, scientists have observed a baboon give a "false alarm." The baboon was being threatened and chased by other group members. To thwart the chasers, he stopped, stood up on his hind legs, and looked into the distance—the same behavior baboons exhibit when they see a predator or another baboon group. In this case there was no danger; the behavior got the other baboons to stop their chase and look in the same direction so the alarm-calling baboon could escape.
The formation of new behaviors (innovation) and the process by which they become traditions within a society may also be evidence of thinking. An example of innovation within a social group is when a wild female Japanese macaque began washing her food with water. The behavior was soon copied by others in the group. When infants began washing their food also, the behavior was passed on to a new generation and a tradition was born. Researching these types of innovation can take many years since new social traditions sometimes spread slowly through a population.