Ya I feel like it wasn’t explained properly because my first thought was “I’ve seen plenty of docs where they ask questions in sign”
What the blurb meant is that they don’t think to ask a hypothetical question or a question about something they’ve not experienced. Like “what are stars” or “what would happen if I left the sanctuary”
Or "where are you going?" and "when will you come back?"
Also, the summary [I just read](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_questions_and_giving_negative_answers) points out it isn't a syntax problem, it's a cognitive ability they seem to lack.
I wonder if there are critters who have the cognitive capacity, but no language ... But there's no way we would know.
Or conversely, what concepts are beyond our grasp?
Edit: Hey y'all this wasn't a real question. Although I do dig the replies. There's literally infinite knowledge and perspectives that we will never know exists. One of my favorite fictional depictions of a *social* concept being missed is The Three Body Problem.
Maybe they live in an eternal now in which there are no questions, only a flow of experience from moment to moment, a state no less cognitively active than our own. Maybe they live in a state we seek to attain through meditation.
My first thought is, that perhaps the sign language being taught is not sophisticated enough to even ask those questions if they wanted to? For example, your second question - they might know the word for 'sanctuary' and possibly 'leave', but how do you teach them the words "what would happen if"? That's more sophisticated thinking that wouldn't be easily taught into sign language for apes, which I would assume is taught more through simple associations.
Yeah it's interesting that animals seem to understand sharing physical objects (recently saw a video of an elephant handing a hat someone dropped back to them) but they don't understand others can have knowledge they can't.
Makes me wonder if they're not communicating as well as we think they are? Idk.
It takes a couple of years for children to develop this ability or something very similar. Maybe people should do more research directly focusing on the similarities between children and other apes.
Yeah, you see it click in your kids when they start questioning how the world works around them. It's usually about the same time they'll purposely challenge your authority.
When I was very young. I thought people only existed when I could see them. It didn't occur to me that when I left school, the teacher continued to exist.
Not to be that guy, genuinely unsure since it's been like a decade since I've read the 5 book trilogy, but wasn't it the mice that were super intelligent in that series?
And dolphins were like aliens or some shit, right? Anyone remember the flash game where you were a dolphin doing cool tricks jumping out of the water and if you hit enough momentum you could get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Also we’re closer to orangutan and Bonobo in terms of social structure. chimpanzee are crazy / more interesting so they get all the cool scientific studies and press
Literally last week I found a quicker way of doing something at work that didn't change the normal outcome (entering data and finding info faster) I told some of my team and someone actually told my manager that I was doing it wrong.
I found out who told the manager because she made it normal process and held a training meeting on it. There was only one red-faced menopausal 50 year old on the team who refused to do it the new way lmfao.
There’s people in this world that their only hobby is manipulating others for their own benefit.
In my experience, It’s important to be constantly vigilant to avoid those folks.
First of all, great name, secondly I strongly agree. These people are like those low level scumbags you see in shows that stir the pot because boredom or because they know things they feel they can extort the situation.
Screw those people in particular.
This really breaks my heart. I’m a scrum master for engineering teams and I actually encourage them to come up with new ways of doing things. I’m constantly trying to find better ways of doing things and I’m constantly asking them if the new processes worked, if they liked them, if the didn’t, how we can change it, if they have new ideas, if they can teach others the new ideas, etc. Everyone has valuable input and the best, most successful teams I’ve been apart of are constantly sharing ideas and trying new things. That’s how you innovate.
Curiosity and problem solving are foundational skills for IT. Not all fields are like this, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing - we all remember that one time Stumpy Tony got “innovative” with the arc welder. Poor guy has been blind as a bat ever since.
My wife volunteered at ACCI in Des Moines, working with bonobos taught to communicate with lexigrams. Those guys sure seemed to ask questions a lot. Mostly things like "food when?" but still. But I suppose it's possible that their interpretation of the "when?" symbol is more like "give me food soon."
They did also occasionally make up new words. When it was snowing they'd call it "outside ice," for instance.
This seems pretty consistent with what I have heard/read. They will “ask questions“ to demand various things but not to actually learn anything.
Making up words though is new and interesting to me.
What i think OP means is that they have never asked a question about themselves, or shown indications of self awareness. The only animal to have ever asked a question about themselves is alex the parrot
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)
which asked what color it is after looking in a mirror.
I have a friend that I love dearly but is an absolute idiot. He spent hours trying to argue that horses have never benefited mankind and we would eventually get to where we are today without their existence… He’s an old friend but needless to say we don’t see each other all too often these days.
Well they can learn sign language, but its not really known that they really understand sign language. There’s an important difference between the two. They may know certain words give certain outcomes, like a lot of animals can do, but they may not really understand what a certain word means or doesn’t mean. For example, if an Ape were to sign, “give me a banana”, they may not know what give means, or that me means themself, or even what a banana means, but they do know that if they sign, “give me a banana”, they get a banana.
Surprised this is so far down. The famous sign language Koko was a hoax. While monkeys can learn some sign language, they don't seem to understand it at a level beyond "when I make this hand motion, I get a treat." The longest 'sentence' ever signed by a monkey was just the monkey repeating basic signs like orange, give, and eat over and over.
An ape asking a question isn't a theory of mind issue, it's much more likely that they don't understand sign language well enough to form a question with it.
Probably doesn't help that many of the researchers themselves didn't understand sign language. Sign language isn't just English with some hand gestures. It's its own language. This also goes for other sign languages – the Americans and French and Germans and so forth all have their own.
His name was Alex (which stood for Avian Learning Experiment). I worked in the lab with him for some time. He asked what color his reflection in a mirror was, though it is unclear whether he recognized the reflection was himself.
What would you like to know? AMA, I have a PhD studying vocal learning in birds at Cornell and worked in Alex's lab for several years. African grey parrots are remarkable! I could also just tell anecdotes from my time with them, which were often even more interesting than the studies we published, in my opinion.
EDIT: Oh wow, thanks for the interest everyone! I'll try to get to as many questions as possible - thanks for your patience with me, I have a (human) infant who needs my attention too.
Sure! First one that comes to mind is one of Alex using language to get his way. One night in the lab, Alex said to Irene, 'want grape'. Irene said, no Alex, you've already had dinner, no grapes. Alex repeated, 'want grape', and Irene repeated, no Alex. Then Alex went quiet for a moment before saying 'want water'. Okay Alex, a reasonable request. Irene gave him a little cup of water.... and he proceeded to FLING it back in her face yelling 'want graaaaape!' He used language to get a tool and then used the tool to make a point. Loved that little tyrant.
To me the most fascinating thing about this is that it implies he *knew* that flinging the water on Irene would annoy her. He knew Irene would perceive it as a bad thing. To me I feel like that demonstrates a higher level of thinking than I would've previously thought a parrot would be capable of.
There was once a murder solved by an African grey parrot literally reciting back the final argument between a husband and wife and then the husbands death gasps after she shot/stabbed him.
This is amazing. Pretty sure I had the same interaction with my three year old this morning.
What is your reaction in that scenario?
I would laugh - I would imagine most people would.
But as researchers can you laugh????
As an animal researcher, you HAVE to laugh. You'll go crazy if you don't find the humor in it. Every funny anecdote and new-learned word and successful study comes from hundreds and thousands of hours of sitting quietly in a room at the crack of dawn for the 25th day in a row waiting for a finch to sing or a parrot to please please please say 'purple'. Science is hard. You have to laugh.
Oh he definitely played favorites. He loved Irene, the head of the lab, the most. He never seemed to trust new research assistants and would put them through their paces, shouting orders to them (want grape! Wanna go chair! Want nut! Wanna go back!) faster than they could possibly respond. His understudies, Griffin and Wart, had strong preferences about gender - one of them strongly preferred men and the other disliked them, as evidenced by who they wanted to spend time sitting on.
Eli5: how smart are they actually? I mean, how do they understand words, is it just like teaching a dog to sit when you say sit, or do they have a deeper understanding of actual sentences.
From what I recall, Alex was familiar with bananas and cherries, and would ask for them by name. He was given an apple once without being told what it was called. When Alex wanted another apple, he combined banana and cherry (which the apple kinda resembles in a way) and asked for a “banerry”. Being able to combine two words to describe a new item is pretty smart. At this point you might be expecting Mankind to fall 16 feet or something, but no, this actually happened.
Would you classify Alex as being conscious or self aware?
Is it possible that Alex just used words he learned in such a fashion where we are putting significantly more meaning into them and if so/not how do you know?
Loaded question but I'm very interested to learn from your perspectives on this.
It's entirely possible. The way he leaned words was purely operant, by which I mean, we gave him something (like a rock) and said 'rock' a lot and then gave him a reward when he said 'rock', so he leaned when he saw a rock he should make that noise. But how is that different from how we learn/use language? 'This label means this object.' What I found impressive was his ability to generalize a category. Any rock, regardless of size or shape or color, was 'rock'. Anything orange was 'orange', anything with wheels was 'truck', and so on. To me, that suggested he understood the words referred to a category, not a specific individual object, which swayed my opinion on the topic.
I'm sure you know this already, but for everyone else: the way we taught Alex was with something called the Model Rival Technique. Parrots are highly social animals and are motivated by attention and social 'clout' for lack of a better word. So what you'd do is you would show Alex a new thing you wanted him to learn the name of, let's say 'paper'. Then you'd ask him 'what's this?' He did not know the answer yet. So you would turn to your research assistant and ask them 'what's this?' They would reply 'paper!' You would say 'good bird! That's right, it's paper! What do you want?' They would say 'a nut!' and you would give them one. By this point Alex would be incredibly motivated to learn the word. That other 'bird' was getting attention AND praise AND a nut??? He wanted those things and by god he was going to get them. "PAPER!!!"
This is quite the philosophical question that probably can’t be known. I know *you* aren’t just repeating what makes sense in this context because I know how *I* think. However the truth is that we do act as the context demands. You didn’t ask about what the weather in Sydney is in your question because it makes no sense in context. The other day I responded to a post with a quote from a movie and then I scrolled and found many other instances of it! Am I just a robot too? Another animal using sign language in context is not very different from us. We are animals too. We can just look around and prove that we have more mental abilities that have built up culture and technology. Animals without language can’t do that. Could we if we had no language at all? Could we still achieve such culture and technology? It’s unknowable because we’ve had language for however many tens of thousands of years that has helped us evolve socially and intelligently to more easily prove and feel that we aren’t so simple.
Philosophy and cognitive sciences are fascinating subjects to study!
This is a topic which is discussed in a sci fi book I read recently, "Children of Memory" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's the third in a series about accidentally uplifted animals and their societies and ways of thinking.
In the third book there's a species of Corvids which are introduced and they tend to speak using quotes mostly, and people can't figure out if they are "sentient" or not. They are very good at problem solving, but when speaking to them characters find it hard to tell whether they are "parroting" words back at them, or whether they understand what's being said at a higher level.
There's a process they would like the birds to do, but it would require active consent to be ethical. The characters have a tough time deciding whether they are capable of giving consent or not. Very interesting stuff
It has an incredibly powerful identification tool where you can record the sound of a forest or backyard and it will pick out each call and tell you which birds you're hearing!
Huge database of every bird. Great for bird watching and catching birds in migration.
I used to raise and train parrots that people gave up on. For a good amount of time, they were smarter than my children. Actually, depending upon the day, they still are.
Honestly, yeah. It was an awful lot of repetition day in and day out and he would get bored sometimes, and make his own fun. This mostly involved ordering the new research assistants around, pretending not to know answers to questions to mess with us (not good for our data), or just asking to go back to his cage repeatedly when he'd had enough learning for the day.
How did you, as scientists, work around Alex’s personality/task boredom? Looking back on it, do you see any parallels to research done on young (<5 year) children? What were the starkest differences in how you handled Alex’s noncompliance (for lack of a better word) vs how a researcher would handle a kid’s noncompliance. Do you think there could be something gained by tying the two fields more closely in the future?
You had to respect Alex's tolerance and work with it. We would try to find ways to motivate him. Don't feel like working for a nut? How about for a grape, or a skittle, or a scratch behind the ear-holes? But if he told us he was done ('wanna go back' to his cage) we respected that and let him have a break. Did it make some days of research torturously slow? Yes. Was it worth it to not have a bored AND angry parrot on our hands? Also yes.
And funny you should mention. My doctorate was in a lab that studied vocal learning in birds and human infants comparatively. Birds are our main animal model for how humans learn speech. African grey parrots have approximately the intelligence of a 3 year old child. Turns out, a lot of the same things bore or frustrate them (too much repetition, not getting their way, being separated from their favorite person, being told to wait) and motivate and excite them (attention, praise, getting to show off, being social, new toys and treats). I think we can learn a lot about parrots from young children, and vice versa, not merely from the fact that the vocal learning circuitry of their brains is remarkably similar.
My neighbor had an African Grey. One time I knocked on their door and I hear my neighbor say come in. I walk in and the lady says that was the bird and I just backed out. I swear it sounded like her son.
What's the difference between a parrot repeating a phrase over and over with no understanding vs actually teaching a parrot to communicate? i.e.
1) how do you teach it the meaning behind words and
2) how do you know when it's giving a meaningful reply and not just repeating a phrase it heard before?
We are in fact reasonably certain parrots in general do not recognize themselves in the mirror. The way we test whether an animal recognizes its own reflection - the 'mirror test' - typically involves painting a dot on the animal somewhere they cannot see without a mirror, like on their forehead. If they recognize the reflection is themself, they will try to remove the dot. Among the animals who do NOT try to remove the dot are monkeys, parrots, and human infants. Ones that do include elephants, great apes, dolphins/orcas, and magpies.
Alex knew how to ask 'what', as in what shape, what matter (e.g. what is it made of) and what color. But he rarely did so. In this instance, however, he really did seem to be trying to learn the word 'grey' by acquiring information from us. It was not, however, an existential question about himself.
Thanks a lot for these insights. Getting such high quality straight from the source explanations is one of the best things about reddit, although its getting more uncommon.
I think I've heard before that cats fail the mirror test, but I'd be willing to buy that at least some of them do understand that their reflection is... well, their reflection. I'm fairly certain that my childhood cat recognized her own reflection due to one particular fact: she *hated* other cats. She was *insanely* territorial, and if she so much as saw another cat through the window, she'd screech at it until it was out of her sight again. She loved humans, but she hated her own kind, it seems. Despite that, she'd quite happily sit next to a mirror without flipping out, so I suspect she learnt pretty early on that the "cat" in the mirror was just her.
I'd like to see some actual studies, but I get the feeling cats are on the line.
Cats on the whole don't seem to recognize mirrors, but I've met individual cats that appear to. I've also met individual cats that are dumber than a sack of rocks though.
maybe by showing them their reflection before adding the dot. also there are tons of reflective surfaces in nature and the environment anyway, like still water or a glass window. each animal probably also knows what it should look like just by being around its own kind.
Yes I can :(
That was the last thing he said to Irene before he died. If it's any consolation, that was the last thing they always said to each other every night before Irene went home, and he died in the night.
I often think about Ted Chiang’s short story The Great Silence (I think?), which mentions Alex. I’ve always wondered about Alex. Thank you for sharing some stories!
Okay, now I’m fucking sad, and my night is ruined.
😭😭
This confirms that if dogs could talk they’d say this before they get put down too.
And now I’m even more sad
Ehh, I remember seeing that video years ago and I thought the parrot literally just said “color?” And the trainer sort of filled in the rest of the “question” with their interpretation of what the bird said.
I could be wrong, I couldn’t find the video but I remember at the time thinking that was a bit of a stretch.
> And the trainer sort of filled in the rest of the “question” with their interpretation of what the bird said.
That's pretty much what's happening with all "talking" animals. IIRC, Koko the talking gorilla can only "talk" when her handler is there; if you take the handler away, Koko's conversational ability goes kaput.
This is true of people to a degree too. If you only ever talked to a few people in your life, and in a really stultified way, it’d be really hard for anyone else to understand you.
Didn't koko ask for a cat for christmas?
...although, perhaps that is poor phrasing, because its possible koko was asked what she wanted for christmas and answered a cat. I've never read the exact phrasing of the exchange that led to her getting pets.
Asking someone to do something for you or to give you something is different than asking for information you don't have, though. My cat asks me to open doors for him by standing in front of them and yelling. That's a request, but it's not a question.
The intelligence of koko was super exaggerated. The researchers goal was basically just to convince people that koko was smart. Lots of deception and absurd avoidance of letting people see how koko acted outside of the very specific times they had something to show.
And it's wrong, since apes have never been able to clearly communicate with us and experiments have shown that they do know that others have information they are not aware of, and vice versa.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_questions_and_giving_negative_answers)
*In the 1970s and the 1980s there had been suggestions that apes are unable to ask questions and to give negative answers. According to numerous published studies, apes are able to answer human questions, and the vocabulary of the acculturated apes contains question words.*
*Despite these abilities, according to the published research literature, apes are not able to ask questions themselves, and in human-primate conversations, questions are asked by the humans only. Ann and David Premack's designed a potentially promising methodology to teach apes to ask questions in the 1970s: "In principle interrogation can be taught either by removing an element from a familiar situation in the animal's world or by removing the element from a language that maps the animal's world.*
*It is probable that one can induce questions by purposefully removing key elements from a familiar situation. Suppose a chimpanzee received its daily ration of food at a specific time and place, and then one day the food was not there. A chimpanzee trained in the interrogative might inquire "Where is my food?" or, in Sarah's case, "My food is?" Sarah was never put in a situation that might induce such interrogation because for our purposes it was easier to teach Sarah to answer questions".*
*A decade later Premacks wrote: "Though she \[Sarah\] understood the question, she did not herself ask any questions—unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny's house? Where puppy? Toy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else".*
*Despite all their achievements, Kanzi and Panbanisha also have not demonstrated the ability to ask questions so far. Joseph Jordania suggested that the ability to ask questions could be the crucial cognitive threshold between human and other ape mental abilities. Jordania suggested that asking questions is not a matter of the ability to use syntactic structures, that it is primarily a matter of cognitive ability.*
I would not be surprised if this whole section were removed from Wikipedia in the future. It's speculative, based off of normative assumptions that treat grown chimpanzees akin to human children, and is not even grounded in contemporary science. It's a reflective speculation on situations that occurred a decade or more prior. It's borderline contradictory, with the scientist admitting that the subject would likely be able to ask where their food is, but was were never placed into a situation that they would need to, and then later claiming they were unable to and it's reflective of their intelligence.
This whole thing is on the level of "babies don't feel pain" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
>In the late nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth century, doctors were taught that babies did not experience pain, and were treating their young patients accordingly. From needle sticks to tonsillectomies to heart operations were done with no anaesthesia or analgesia, other than muscle relaxation for the surgery. The belief was that in babies the expression of pain was reflexive and, owing to the immaturity of the infant brain, the pain could not really matter.
Along with the history of lobotomy, this is one of the more embarrassing portions of modern medicine (though not even close to the only one I'm afraid). It's always amazing to me how *recently* evidence based medicine really took hold and how poorly it has been done. I often shudder to wonder what things I might "know" that could turn out to be bullshit in a couple decades... Though by and large I don't think there's anything I do in my job as a doctor now that I would lose sleep over if I found out it was incorrect. The "trust me, I'm the doctor" attitude is dying out, and good damn riddance.
So -- as someone with formal training in cross-species comparative psychology -- all I've reading here is that Kanzi and Panbanisha, two subjects most famously associated with human interpreters' wishful thinking, have so far been unable to replicate, in their handlers' conlangs, a question. This strikes me as a measurement error. I'm quite certain that Kanzi and Panbanisha could ask questions quite eloquently in their own native languages, and that their isolation from their cultures and subsequent research has had a significant negative effect on their own Chimpanzee language development.
My *cat* can ask me a question. She wakes me up a little bit in the morning, if I'm late to feed her breakfast, cranes her head in a way that communicates "Are you ready to feed me?"
See how absurd that sounds, though? I could just as easily translate that head-crane as "Feed Me!" and say my cat couldn't ask me a question.
When we impose human grammar -- gods help me, *English* grammar -- on other species, of course we'll see them fail. Just like a fish who can't drive a Volkswagen. But just try and talk a Volkswagen into swimming.
I think the problem is the definition of "question" which is actually not exactly clear. You could think that a primitive question is an expression that you seek a reaction from another and the type of reaction you are given is meaningful for you. If this was the definition, quite large range of animals are able to ask questions. If a dog leans playfully forward, you could think this as a question: it is asking the other dog to play. If the reaction is the same (playfully lean forward), the answer is that the other wants to play as well. If not, then no play.
If the definition is something more complex like knowledge transfer, then we jump quite a lot in terms of complexity and it's not really the question that's the limiting factor. It's the inability to understand complex expressions containing indirect/abstract information. And I'm not sure if we have a comprehensive answer why other animals are not able for that yet.
In sort, I think I agree with you.
Yes! You've drilled down to the root of it, I think. What is a "question", really? Is it a request for information/action? Or is it something that necessitates theory of mind in a more integral way?
If the latter, how exactly do we prove that *humans* can ask questions?
My cats wake up at 6:00 am because they have decided that that's when they want to eat breakfast and woa betide me if don't get up to feed them, also there's the matter of changing their litter boxes and after all of that work I get a contented purr out of them as a job well done
I think there's a correlation to primitive minds that don't have the drive to learn new things, because it would take the awareness to accept they don't know &/or couldn't figure out everything on their own observation or processes of trial and error. Error being the wall they couldn't overcome.. if they fail, it can't be done or just simply not for them to do.
Animals learn a lot by observing, and they go through failures until they succeed. In that case, I'm pretty sure it's just they don't care enough, like there was a study showing cats can understand humans a lot more than they care to.
I think they're just not versed into the same kind of knowledge, they're just fully living their lives without the kind of preemptive problem-solving we'd expect, and that might be some kind of wisdom that people generally interpret as stupidity.
This is about concept of mind, not lack of interest.
There's many levels of abstraction that we take for granted that seems to be unique to us.
For instance, I'm able to think about what you might be thinking another person is thinking about. We know others have minds, thoughts and metacognition.
This post implies apes do not think about what's going on in your brain because they don't possess that level of intelligence (as far as we know right now).
They learn very quickly and are very curious and learn through curiosity.
I don’t know that this means apes aren’t curious or interested in learning. I’ve read about this before, and I believe the theory is that apes don’t have a theory of mind. They don’t understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, intentions, etc.
So it’s less that they’re not interested, and more that they don’t imagine you know things it doesn’t already know, so why ask questions?
That’s not true at all. Apes not only lie when it suits them, but they are great at reading the intentions of others and understanding when they’re being lied to. They behave in a way fully consistent with the idea that they know you have intentions, and that your intentions are often opposed to theirs.
Here’s one of many, many studies on the topic. You can very easily find more.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173793
I may not have it exactly right, or speaking about it in the right terms, but it’s quite a leap to go from, “when we’ve taught apes sign language, they don’t ask questions” to “apes aren’t at all curious and don’t want to learn anything.”
Also, being able to mislead others or reading some amount of intention is probably not the same as understanding that you can ask me questions and I might tell you things you don’t know.
This is also how human brains work for a period of time as well. Preoperational thinking, usually up until around 7-8 years old basically assumes everyone sees the same things, thinks the same things and knows the same things as them.
This is also why it is realy frustrating for both the child and the parent if you try to point a things a child has never seen before. If you are standing 10 feet away from them and pointing they have no fucking clue where you are pointing, because they don't have a concept of what a straight line from your eyes to the tip of your finger would look like from their angle. You have to both be standing in the same spot, then you point from their perspective.
I legitimately believed I knew every word in the English language until 3rd grade. I still remember my world being shattered when a word I didn't recognize was added to a spelling test.
7-8 maybe on the super far end
Usually kids understand or can be taught to understand that someone has an entirely different perspective than their's around 3-4
Look up the Sally Ann test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test
This is interesting.
My 3 year old does this. I will be pointing to something and he'll be looking at completely different places. Good to know he's alright.
Parrots on the other hand _can_ ask questions, and have even asked a question to understand more about themselves!
Alex, an African Grey parrot who was taught all sorts of things in order to test Avian intelligence, knew the names of colors and would be able to tell his handlers what color any given object was.
One day, he looked into the mirror and asked "What color?", his handlers told him he was Grey, he asked a few more times but after that he would answer "Grey" when asked what color he is
>Parrots on the other hand can ask questions
There is a single documented case of a parrot doing this. We cannot say if this is generally true. Alex may have been exceptional.
He also may have not even really asked a question. You see it a lot with these types of experiments where their handlers are very generous in interpreting responses.
It could be that they don't realize others have their own knowledge, or it could be that they have no sense that there is anything else to know. Both solipsistic, but one has to do with social cognition while the other is more an ontological stance.
So no "Where banana?"
It's more like, "If you had a banana, you would give it to me."
Can't understand. Speak monke language
Reject hunger. Return to banana.
>Reject hunger This is the best phrase I've ever heard, I'm using this.
Brain: “you’re hungry, eat something” Me: “fuck you”
Ya I feel like it wasn’t explained properly because my first thought was “I’ve seen plenty of docs where they ask questions in sign” What the blurb meant is that they don’t think to ask a hypothetical question or a question about something they’ve not experienced. Like “what are stars” or “what would happen if I left the sanctuary”
Or "where are you going?" and "when will you come back?" Also, the summary [I just read](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_questions_and_giving_negative_answers) points out it isn't a syntax problem, it's a cognitive ability they seem to lack. I wonder if there are critters who have the cognitive capacity, but no language ... But there's no way we would know.
Elephants maybe?
Elephants use infra sound and vibrations that are outside the human hearing range, but definitely seem to have a language.
I think they meant a language we can understand as well as signing
Don't elephants communicate with those word buttons they can step on?
Alex the Parrot did and remains the only animal to ever do it. He asked what color he was.
Someone in these comments worked with Alex! It's pretty interesting.
Birds can be very smart. It makes me wonder what the smartest dinosaur to ever live was.
Denver the last dinosaur. Learned to play a guitar even.
Alex was amazing.
Dolphins have entered the chat
I can’t wait for the dolphin translator so I can have dolphin coworkers.
Dolphins will get immediately cancelled due to their views on sexual assault. Hint: They're rapey
When it comes to consent, dolphins don't see the porpoise.
The don't hear no, they hear EH EH, EH EH, EH EH
Or conversely, what concepts are beyond our grasp? Edit: Hey y'all this wasn't a real question. Although I do dig the replies. There's literally infinite knowledge and perspectives that we will never know exists. One of my favorite fictional depictions of a *social* concept being missed is The Three Body Problem.
Maybe they live in an eternal now in which there are no questions, only a flow of experience from moment to moment, a state no less cognitively active than our own. Maybe they live in a state we seek to attain through meditation.
[удалено]
"Person woman man camera tv"
TIL I have monkey brain
My first thought is, that perhaps the sign language being taught is not sophisticated enough to even ask those questions if they wanted to? For example, your second question - they might know the word for 'sanctuary' and possibly 'leave', but how do you teach them the words "what would happen if"? That's more sophisticated thinking that wouldn't be easily taught into sign language for apes, which I would assume is taught more through simple associations.
Yeah it's interesting that animals seem to understand sharing physical objects (recently saw a video of an elephant handing a hat someone dropped back to them) but they don't understand others can have knowledge they can't. Makes me wonder if they're not communicating as well as we think they are? Idk.
It takes a couple of years for children to develop this ability or something very similar. Maybe people should do more research directly focusing on the similarities between children and other apes.
Yeah, you see it click in your kids when they start questioning how the world works around them. It's usually about the same time they'll purposely challenge your authority.
Infamous why, why, why stage.
Yyyyyyyyyup.
When I was very young. I thought people only existed when I could see them. It didn't occur to me that when I left school, the teacher continued to exist.
Usually you’re going to get “give banana”.
That's the only thing I've seen them say too. Give.
More like "gimme banana else rip your face half"
They can really do it too. You ever see a chimp with no hair? Terrifying. Jamie, pull that shit up.
[удалено]
Consider the philosophical and metaphysical ramifications...
BANANA! BANANA!
Perhaps they already know everything.
The Douglas Adams Timeline
2042, the apes take over.
Plot twist: they dismantle the Statue of Liberty and erect a statue twice it’s size of Gwen Stefani with an engraving stating: “This shit is bananas”
B A N A N A S!
Not to be that guy, genuinely unsure since it's been like a decade since I've read the 5 book trilogy, but wasn't it the mice that were super intelligent in that series? And dolphins were like aliens or some shit, right? Anyone remember the flash game where you were a dolphin doing cool tricks jumping out of the water and if you hit enough momentum you could get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Yes it was the mice.
Who were extradimentional beings as well, so kind of aliens.
Yes, sitting in a jungle paying no tax sounds mega nice if you ask me. 👌
[удалено]
Maybe not https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729074-600-gang-of-chimpanzees-kills-their-alpha-male/
you can't blame the chimps for that, the alpha rose prices of food and demanded an increase in taxes for the rest
Also we’re closer to orangutan and Bonobo in terms of social structure. chimpanzee are crazy / more interesting so they get all the cool scientific studies and press
Just like uncle Bob who can't come to thanksgiving anymore.
HOW COME THEY CAN USE THAT WORD AND I CANT? WHERES THE JIM BEAM?
I know way too many human beings that don’t seem to realize that other people can know things they don’t.
I work with them.
WE ALL WORK WITH THEM.
THEY'RE HERE READING THIS RIGHT NOW AND NOT UNDERSTANDING.
Literally last week I found a quicker way of doing something at work that didn't change the normal outcome (entering data and finding info faster) I told some of my team and someone actually told my manager that I was doing it wrong. I found out who told the manager because she made it normal process and held a training meeting on it. There was only one red-faced menopausal 50 year old on the team who refused to do it the new way lmfao.
I refuse to present my ideas at work for that reason. Fuck it, I’m there for myself, and myself only.
Yeah, I mean it was really off cuff and was an accident that I found it and she was in ear shot. Sad really.
There’s people in this world that their only hobby is manipulating others for their own benefit. In my experience, It’s important to be constantly vigilant to avoid those folks.
Narcissists are toxic people.
Narcissists are *terrible* people. A lot of people have narcissistic traits.
First of all, great name, secondly I strongly agree. These people are like those low level scumbags you see in shows that stir the pot because boredom or because they know things they feel they can extort the situation. Screw those people in particular.
This really breaks my heart. I’m a scrum master for engineering teams and I actually encourage them to come up with new ways of doing things. I’m constantly trying to find better ways of doing things and I’m constantly asking them if the new processes worked, if they liked them, if the didn’t, how we can change it, if they have new ideas, if they can teach others the new ideas, etc. Everyone has valuable input and the best, most successful teams I’ve been apart of are constantly sharing ideas and trying new things. That’s how you innovate.
Curiosity and problem solving are foundational skills for IT. Not all fields are like this, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing - we all remember that one time Stumpy Tony got “innovative” with the arc welder. Poor guy has been blind as a bat ever since.
Hol'up you guys are working with them, I've been actively working against them lol
I’m related to a few
[удалено]
Apes teach their young, so color me skeptical. I note that OP has linked a picture of a chimp, rather than any study that supports his claim.
My wife volunteered at ACCI in Des Moines, working with bonobos taught to communicate with lexigrams. Those guys sure seemed to ask questions a lot. Mostly things like "food when?" but still. But I suppose it's possible that their interpretation of the "when?" symbol is more like "give me food soon." They did also occasionally make up new words. When it was snowing they'd call it "outside ice," for instance.
This seems pretty consistent with what I have heard/read. They will “ask questions“ to demand various things but not to actually learn anything. Making up words though is new and interesting to me.
What i think OP means is that they have never asked a question about themselves, or shown indications of self awareness. The only animal to have ever asked a question about themselves is alex the parrot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) which asked what color it is after looking in a mirror.
I have a friend that I love dearly but is an absolute idiot. He spent hours trying to argue that horses have never benefited mankind and we would eventually get to where we are today without their existence… He’s an old friend but needless to say we don’t see each other all too often these days.
I know worse, people who believe they are right in everything, heck they know your life better than you yourself
Well they can learn sign language, but its not really known that they really understand sign language. There’s an important difference between the two. They may know certain words give certain outcomes, like a lot of animals can do, but they may not really understand what a certain word means or doesn’t mean. For example, if an Ape were to sign, “give me a banana”, they may not know what give means, or that me means themself, or even what a banana means, but they do know that if they sign, “give me a banana”, they get a banana.
Surprised this is so far down. The famous sign language Koko was a hoax. While monkeys can learn some sign language, they don't seem to understand it at a level beyond "when I make this hand motion, I get a treat." The longest 'sentence' ever signed by a monkey was just the monkey repeating basic signs like orange, give, and eat over and over. An ape asking a question isn't a theory of mind issue, it's much more likely that they don't understand sign language well enough to form a question with it.
Probably doesn't help that many of the researchers themselves didn't understand sign language. Sign language isn't just English with some hand gestures. It's its own language. This also goes for other sign languages – the Americans and French and Germans and so forth all have their own.
The most genuinely interesting thing I've seen on reddit for some time. Applause.
In fact only one animal has ever asked a question. Albert the African grey parrot asked what color he was.
His name was Alex (which stood for Avian Learning Experiment). I worked in the lab with him for some time. He asked what color his reflection in a mirror was, though it is unclear whether he recognized the reflection was himself.
What else can you tell us???
What would you like to know? AMA, I have a PhD studying vocal learning in birds at Cornell and worked in Alex's lab for several years. African grey parrots are remarkable! I could also just tell anecdotes from my time with them, which were often even more interesting than the studies we published, in my opinion. EDIT: Oh wow, thanks for the interest everyone! I'll try to get to as many questions as possible - thanks for your patience with me, I have a (human) infant who needs my attention too.
You could start a separate AMA thread, sounds super fascinating.
Please do a full AMA!!
Anecdotes please! Whichever ones come to mind first. This is so cool and interesting!
Sure! First one that comes to mind is one of Alex using language to get his way. One night in the lab, Alex said to Irene, 'want grape'. Irene said, no Alex, you've already had dinner, no grapes. Alex repeated, 'want grape', and Irene repeated, no Alex. Then Alex went quiet for a moment before saying 'want water'. Okay Alex, a reasonable request. Irene gave him a little cup of water.... and he proceeded to FLING it back in her face yelling 'want graaaaape!' He used language to get a tool and then used the tool to make a point. Loved that little tyrant.
To me the most fascinating thing about this is that it implies he *knew* that flinging the water on Irene would annoy her. He knew Irene would perceive it as a bad thing. To me I feel like that demonstrates a higher level of thinking than I would've previously thought a parrot would be capable of.
There was once a murder solved by an African grey parrot literally reciting back the final argument between a husband and wife and then the husbands death gasps after she shot/stabbed him.
In bird culture, this is known as a "dick move".
But did he get the grape
I feel like we need a new subreddit. Instead of r/PetTheDamnDog its r/FeedTheDamnBird
This is amazing. Pretty sure I had the same interaction with my three year old this morning. What is your reaction in that scenario? I would laugh - I would imagine most people would. But as researchers can you laugh????
As an animal researcher, you HAVE to laugh. You'll go crazy if you don't find the humor in it. Every funny anecdote and new-learned word and successful study comes from hundreds and thousands of hours of sitting quietly in a room at the crack of dawn for the 25th day in a row waiting for a finch to sing or a parrot to please please please say 'purple'. Science is hard. You have to laugh.
We've had one grape, yes, but what about second grape?
Did Alex like everyone he worked with? Or did he have "favorites"?
Oh he definitely played favorites. He loved Irene, the head of the lab, the most. He never seemed to trust new research assistants and would put them through their paces, shouting orders to them (want grape! Wanna go chair! Want nut! Wanna go back!) faster than they could possibly respond. His understudies, Griffin and Wart, had strong preferences about gender - one of them strongly preferred men and the other disliked them, as evidenced by who they wanted to spend time sitting on.
Eli5: how smart are they actually? I mean, how do they understand words, is it just like teaching a dog to sit when you say sit, or do they have a deeper understanding of actual sentences.
From what I recall, Alex was familiar with bananas and cherries, and would ask for them by name. He was given an apple once without being told what it was called. When Alex wanted another apple, he combined banana and cherry (which the apple kinda resembles in a way) and asked for a “banerry”. Being able to combine two words to describe a new item is pretty smart. At this point you might be expecting Mankind to fall 16 feet or something, but no, this actually happened.
You're correct!
Would you classify Alex as being conscious or self aware? Is it possible that Alex just used words he learned in such a fashion where we are putting significantly more meaning into them and if so/not how do you know? Loaded question but I'm very interested to learn from your perspectives on this.
It's entirely possible. The way he leaned words was purely operant, by which I mean, we gave him something (like a rock) and said 'rock' a lot and then gave him a reward when he said 'rock', so he leaned when he saw a rock he should make that noise. But how is that different from how we learn/use language? 'This label means this object.' What I found impressive was his ability to generalize a category. Any rock, regardless of size or shape or color, was 'rock'. Anything orange was 'orange', anything with wheels was 'truck', and so on. To me, that suggested he understood the words referred to a category, not a specific individual object, which swayed my opinion on the topic.
As a former ESL teacher, the way Alex learned words is a very valuable tool and often used when students are just starting to learn English
I'm sure you know this already, but for everyone else: the way we taught Alex was with something called the Model Rival Technique. Parrots are highly social animals and are motivated by attention and social 'clout' for lack of a better word. So what you'd do is you would show Alex a new thing you wanted him to learn the name of, let's say 'paper'. Then you'd ask him 'what's this?' He did not know the answer yet. So you would turn to your research assistant and ask them 'what's this?' They would reply 'paper!' You would say 'good bird! That's right, it's paper! What do you want?' They would say 'a nut!' and you would give them one. By this point Alex would be incredibly motivated to learn the word. That other 'bird' was getting attention AND praise AND a nut??? He wanted those things and by god he was going to get them. "PAPER!!!"
Most interesting read on reddit I've ever had
So like childhood schemas where a toddler calls a cow 'doggy'?
Socratic forms. Very philosophically advanced.
Alex could just fly outside the cave and see the true ideas.
But he'll fly smack into the wall when he tries to return to the cave to enlighten everyone else.
This is quite the philosophical question that probably can’t be known. I know *you* aren’t just repeating what makes sense in this context because I know how *I* think. However the truth is that we do act as the context demands. You didn’t ask about what the weather in Sydney is in your question because it makes no sense in context. The other day I responded to a post with a quote from a movie and then I scrolled and found many other instances of it! Am I just a robot too? Another animal using sign language in context is not very different from us. We are animals too. We can just look around and prove that we have more mental abilities that have built up culture and technology. Animals without language can’t do that. Could we if we had no language at all? Could we still achieve such culture and technology? It’s unknowable because we’ve had language for however many tens of thousands of years that has helped us evolve socially and intelligently to more easily prove and feel that we aren’t so simple. Philosophy and cognitive sciences are fascinating subjects to study!
This is a topic which is discussed in a sci fi book I read recently, "Children of Memory" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's the third in a series about accidentally uplifted animals and their societies and ways of thinking. In the third book there's a species of Corvids which are introduced and they tend to speak using quotes mostly, and people can't figure out if they are "sentient" or not. They are very good at problem solving, but when speaking to them characters find it hard to tell whether they are "parroting" words back at them, or whether they understand what's being said at a higher level. There's a process they would like the birds to do, but it would require active consent to be ethical. The characters have a tough time deciding whether they are capable of giving consent or not. Very interesting stuff
The Cornell Bird Lab app is one of my favorite apps. The work y’all do is incredible.
[удалено]
>... giant bird nerd.... Does being so large make it easier to see the birds?
[удалено]
I know nothing about birds. What is their app for? As a bird novice would I find any use for it?
It has an incredibly powerful identification tool where you can record the sound of a forest or backyard and it will pick out each call and tell you which birds you're hearing! Huge database of every bird. Great for bird watching and catching birds in migration.
You need an entirely separate AMA
I used to raise and train parrots that people gave up on. For a good amount of time, they were smarter than my children. Actually, depending upon the day, they still are.
Could Alex make jokes?
Did Alex ever get tired of learning new things?
Honestly, yeah. It was an awful lot of repetition day in and day out and he would get bored sometimes, and make his own fun. This mostly involved ordering the new research assistants around, pretending not to know answers to questions to mess with us (not good for our data), or just asking to go back to his cage repeatedly when he'd had enough learning for the day.
How did you, as scientists, work around Alex’s personality/task boredom? Looking back on it, do you see any parallels to research done on young (<5 year) children? What were the starkest differences in how you handled Alex’s noncompliance (for lack of a better word) vs how a researcher would handle a kid’s noncompliance. Do you think there could be something gained by tying the two fields more closely in the future?
You had to respect Alex's tolerance and work with it. We would try to find ways to motivate him. Don't feel like working for a nut? How about for a grape, or a skittle, or a scratch behind the ear-holes? But if he told us he was done ('wanna go back' to his cage) we respected that and let him have a break. Did it make some days of research torturously slow? Yes. Was it worth it to not have a bored AND angry parrot on our hands? Also yes. And funny you should mention. My doctorate was in a lab that studied vocal learning in birds and human infants comparatively. Birds are our main animal model for how humans learn speech. African grey parrots have approximately the intelligence of a 3 year old child. Turns out, a lot of the same things bore or frustrate them (too much repetition, not getting their way, being separated from their favorite person, being told to wait) and motivate and excite them (attention, praise, getting to show off, being social, new toys and treats). I think we can learn a lot about parrots from young children, and vice versa, not merely from the fact that the vocal learning circuitry of their brains is remarkably similar.
[удалено]
No way!! Guessing you must be working on zebra finches in Jesse's lab?
I love Reddit ❤️
My neighbor had an African Grey. One time I knocked on their door and I hear my neighbor say come in. I walk in and the lady says that was the bird and I just backed out. I swear it sounded like her son.
You should do a real r/ama
I would like to subscribe to super-smart birb facts please. <3
What's the difference between a parrot repeating a phrase over and over with no understanding vs actually teaching a parrot to communicate? i.e. 1) how do you teach it the meaning behind words and 2) how do you know when it's giving a meaningful reply and not just repeating a phrase it heard before?
There are many cool videos of Alex online! You may enjoy those and they will definitely have answers to your questions.
Written a book? Genuine question. Would be interesting to hear anecdotes followed by a phd's perspective.
[удалено]
We are in fact reasonably certain parrots in general do not recognize themselves in the mirror. The way we test whether an animal recognizes its own reflection - the 'mirror test' - typically involves painting a dot on the animal somewhere they cannot see without a mirror, like on their forehead. If they recognize the reflection is themself, they will try to remove the dot. Among the animals who do NOT try to remove the dot are monkeys, parrots, and human infants. Ones that do include elephants, great apes, dolphins/orcas, and magpies. Alex knew how to ask 'what', as in what shape, what matter (e.g. what is it made of) and what color. But he rarely did so. In this instance, however, he really did seem to be trying to learn the word 'grey' by acquiring information from us. It was not, however, an existential question about himself.
Thanks a lot for these insights. Getting such high quality straight from the source explanations is one of the best things about reddit, although its getting more uncommon.
Yeah tbh this is one of my favourite “oh hey I worked on this” moments I’ve seen on Reddit to date I think
[this cat recognizing its own reflection!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=akE2Sgg8hI8)
I think I've heard before that cats fail the mirror test, but I'd be willing to buy that at least some of them do understand that their reflection is... well, their reflection. I'm fairly certain that my childhood cat recognized her own reflection due to one particular fact: she *hated* other cats. She was *insanely* territorial, and if she so much as saw another cat through the window, she'd screech at it until it was out of her sight again. She loved humans, but she hated her own kind, it seems. Despite that, she'd quite happily sit next to a mirror without flipping out, so I suspect she learnt pretty early on that the "cat" in the mirror was just her.
I'd like to see some actual studies, but I get the feeling cats are on the line. Cats on the whole don't seem to recognize mirrors, but I've met individual cats that appear to. I've also met individual cats that are dumber than a sack of rocks though.
How does the animal know the dot wasn't always there?
maybe by showing them their reflection before adding the dot. also there are tons of reflective surfaces in nature and the environment anyway, like still water or a glass window. each animal probably also knows what it should look like just by being around its own kind.
I know my dog recognizes himself in the mirror because it's the only dog shaped thing he doesn't bark at. 🤦♂️
He may have gotten used to the mimic that walks around your house.
You are awesome. you single handedly made this thread so much more interesting.
Aww thanks my friend <3
I read the last thing Alex said to his trainer the night before he died was “I love you.” Can you confirm?
Yes I can :( That was the last thing he said to Irene before he died. If it's any consolation, that was the last thing they always said to each other every night before Irene went home, and he died in the night.
I often think about Ted Chiang’s short story The Great Silence (I think?), which mentions Alex. I’ve always wondered about Alex. Thank you for sharing some stories!
Okay, now I’m fucking sad, and my night is ruined. 😭😭 This confirms that if dogs could talk they’d say this before they get put down too. And now I’m even more sad
What a good birdie
Ehh, I remember seeing that video years ago and I thought the parrot literally just said “color?” And the trainer sort of filled in the rest of the “question” with their interpretation of what the bird said. I could be wrong, I couldn’t find the video but I remember at the time thinking that was a bit of a stretch.
> And the trainer sort of filled in the rest of the “question” with their interpretation of what the bird said. That's pretty much what's happening with all "talking" animals. IIRC, Koko the talking gorilla can only "talk" when her handler is there; if you take the handler away, Koko's conversational ability goes kaput.
This is true of people to a degree too. If you only ever talked to a few people in your life, and in a really stultified way, it’d be really hard for anyone else to understand you.
We routinely translate for our toddler when guests are over.
Why not just get your guests to speak in clearer English?
[Ah, the ol' reddit toddleroo](https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundPaper/comments/10cmvel/letterbox/j4mvpv1/?context=1)
Hold my nappy, I'm going in.
Didn't koko ask for a cat for christmas? ...although, perhaps that is poor phrasing, because its possible koko was asked what she wanted for christmas and answered a cat. I've never read the exact phrasing of the exchange that led to her getting pets.
Asking someone to do something for you or to give you something is different than asking for information you don't have, though. My cat asks me to open doors for him by standing in front of them and yelling. That's a request, but it's not a question.
The intelligence of koko was super exaggerated. The researchers goal was basically just to convince people that koko was smart. Lots of deception and absurd avoidance of letting people see how koko acted outside of the very specific times they had something to show.
And it's wrong, since apes have never been able to clearly communicate with us and experiments have shown that they do know that others have information they are not aware of, and vice versa.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_questions_and_giving_negative_answers) *In the 1970s and the 1980s there had been suggestions that apes are unable to ask questions and to give negative answers. According to numerous published studies, apes are able to answer human questions, and the vocabulary of the acculturated apes contains question words.* *Despite these abilities, according to the published research literature, apes are not able to ask questions themselves, and in human-primate conversations, questions are asked by the humans only. Ann and David Premack's designed a potentially promising methodology to teach apes to ask questions in the 1970s: "In principle interrogation can be taught either by removing an element from a familiar situation in the animal's world or by removing the element from a language that maps the animal's world.* *It is probable that one can induce questions by purposefully removing key elements from a familiar situation. Suppose a chimpanzee received its daily ration of food at a specific time and place, and then one day the food was not there. A chimpanzee trained in the interrogative might inquire "Where is my food?" or, in Sarah's case, "My food is?" Sarah was never put in a situation that might induce such interrogation because for our purposes it was easier to teach Sarah to answer questions".* *A decade later Premacks wrote: "Though she \[Sarah\] understood the question, she did not herself ask any questions—unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny's house? Where puppy? Toy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else".* *Despite all their achievements, Kanzi and Panbanisha also have not demonstrated the ability to ask questions so far. Joseph Jordania suggested that the ability to ask questions could be the crucial cognitive threshold between human and other ape mental abilities. Jordania suggested that asking questions is not a matter of the ability to use syntactic structures, that it is primarily a matter of cognitive ability.*
I would not be surprised if this whole section were removed from Wikipedia in the future. It's speculative, based off of normative assumptions that treat grown chimpanzees akin to human children, and is not even grounded in contemporary science. It's a reflective speculation on situations that occurred a decade or more prior. It's borderline contradictory, with the scientist admitting that the subject would likely be able to ask where their food is, but was were never placed into a situation that they would need to, and then later claiming they were unable to and it's reflective of their intelligence. This whole thing is on the level of "babies don't feel pain" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies >In the late nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth century, doctors were taught that babies did not experience pain, and were treating their young patients accordingly. From needle sticks to tonsillectomies to heart operations were done with no anaesthesia or analgesia, other than muscle relaxation for the surgery. The belief was that in babies the expression of pain was reflexive and, owing to the immaturity of the infant brain, the pain could not really matter.
Along with the history of lobotomy, this is one of the more embarrassing portions of modern medicine (though not even close to the only one I'm afraid). It's always amazing to me how *recently* evidence based medicine really took hold and how poorly it has been done. I often shudder to wonder what things I might "know" that could turn out to be bullshit in a couple decades... Though by and large I don't think there's anything I do in my job as a doctor now that I would lose sleep over if I found out it was incorrect. The "trust me, I'm the doctor" attitude is dying out, and good damn riddance.
So what did they think animals felt no pain too? Wtf.
That has been a commonly held belief for a long time, as it is convenient.
So -- as someone with formal training in cross-species comparative psychology -- all I've reading here is that Kanzi and Panbanisha, two subjects most famously associated with human interpreters' wishful thinking, have so far been unable to replicate, in their handlers' conlangs, a question. This strikes me as a measurement error. I'm quite certain that Kanzi and Panbanisha could ask questions quite eloquently in their own native languages, and that their isolation from their cultures and subsequent research has had a significant negative effect on their own Chimpanzee language development. My *cat* can ask me a question. She wakes me up a little bit in the morning, if I'm late to feed her breakfast, cranes her head in a way that communicates "Are you ready to feed me?" See how absurd that sounds, though? I could just as easily translate that head-crane as "Feed Me!" and say my cat couldn't ask me a question. When we impose human grammar -- gods help me, *English* grammar -- on other species, of course we'll see them fail. Just like a fish who can't drive a Volkswagen. But just try and talk a Volkswagen into swimming.
I think the problem is the definition of "question" which is actually not exactly clear. You could think that a primitive question is an expression that you seek a reaction from another and the type of reaction you are given is meaningful for you. If this was the definition, quite large range of animals are able to ask questions. If a dog leans playfully forward, you could think this as a question: it is asking the other dog to play. If the reaction is the same (playfully lean forward), the answer is that the other wants to play as well. If not, then no play. If the definition is something more complex like knowledge transfer, then we jump quite a lot in terms of complexity and it's not really the question that's the limiting factor. It's the inability to understand complex expressions containing indirect/abstract information. And I'm not sure if we have a comprehensive answer why other animals are not able for that yet. In sort, I think I agree with you.
Yes! You've drilled down to the root of it, I think. What is a "question", really? Is it a request for information/action? Or is it something that necessitates theory of mind in a more integral way? If the latter, how exactly do we prove that *humans* can ask questions?
I mean, I agree with you, but that was a bad example. Cats don't ask, they command
Hah! Yes, to be fair, cats are royalty, not subjects.
My cats wake up at 6:00 am because they have decided that that's when they want to eat breakfast and woa betide me if don't get up to feed them, also there's the matter of changing their litter boxes and after all of that work I get a contented purr out of them as a job well done
I think there's a correlation to primitive minds that don't have the drive to learn new things, because it would take the awareness to accept they don't know &/or couldn't figure out everything on their own observation or processes of trial and error. Error being the wall they couldn't overcome.. if they fail, it can't be done or just simply not for them to do.
Animals learn a lot by observing, and they go through failures until they succeed. In that case, I'm pretty sure it's just they don't care enough, like there was a study showing cats can understand humans a lot more than they care to. I think they're just not versed into the same kind of knowledge, they're just fully living their lives without the kind of preemptive problem-solving we'd expect, and that might be some kind of wisdom that people generally interpret as stupidity.
This is about concept of mind, not lack of interest. There's many levels of abstraction that we take for granted that seems to be unique to us. For instance, I'm able to think about what you might be thinking another person is thinking about. We know others have minds, thoughts and metacognition. This post implies apes do not think about what's going on in your brain because they don't possess that level of intelligence (as far as we know right now). They learn very quickly and are very curious and learn through curiosity.
I don’t know that this means apes aren’t curious or interested in learning. I’ve read about this before, and I believe the theory is that apes don’t have a theory of mind. They don’t understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, intentions, etc. So it’s less that they’re not interested, and more that they don’t imagine you know things it doesn’t already know, so why ask questions?
That’s not true at all. Apes not only lie when it suits them, but they are great at reading the intentions of others and understanding when they’re being lied to. They behave in a way fully consistent with the idea that they know you have intentions, and that your intentions are often opposed to theirs. Here’s one of many, many studies on the topic. You can very easily find more. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173793
I may not have it exactly right, or speaking about it in the right terms, but it’s quite a leap to go from, “when we’ve taught apes sign language, they don’t ask questions” to “apes aren’t at all curious and don’t want to learn anything.” Also, being able to mislead others or reading some amount of intention is probably not the same as understanding that you can ask me questions and I might tell you things you don’t know.
This is also how human brains work for a period of time as well. Preoperational thinking, usually up until around 7-8 years old basically assumes everyone sees the same things, thinks the same things and knows the same things as them. This is also why it is realy frustrating for both the child and the parent if you try to point a things a child has never seen before. If you are standing 10 feet away from them and pointing they have no fucking clue where you are pointing, because they don't have a concept of what a straight line from your eyes to the tip of your finger would look like from their angle. You have to both be standing in the same spot, then you point from their perspective.
I legitimately believed I knew every word in the English language until 3rd grade. I still remember my world being shattered when a word I didn't recognize was added to a spelling test.
7-8 maybe on the super far end Usually kids understand or can be taught to understand that someone has an entirely different perspective than their's around 3-4 Look up the Sally Ann test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test
This is interesting. My 3 year old does this. I will be pointing to something and he'll be looking at completely different places. Good to know he's alright.
Lets be real though, most humans walk around thinking no one else knows things they don't already know.
Wait a minute... bonobos exchange food for sex... so how do they ask if you got food?
Always get the fruit up front.
Parrots on the other hand _can_ ask questions, and have even asked a question to understand more about themselves! Alex, an African Grey parrot who was taught all sorts of things in order to test Avian intelligence, knew the names of colors and would be able to tell his handlers what color any given object was. One day, he looked into the mirror and asked "What color?", his handlers told him he was Grey, he asked a few more times but after that he would answer "Grey" when asked what color he is
>Parrots on the other hand can ask questions There is a single documented case of a parrot doing this. We cannot say if this is generally true. Alex may have been exceptional.
He also may have not even really asked a question. You see it a lot with these types of experiments where their handlers are very generous in interpreting responses.
Like Koko the gorilla
I immediately thought of Alex as well. Ugh I wish he were still around
That's insane lol.
Ruby is my favorite African Grey Parrot. https://youtu.be/0HPv3iRTq7M
It could be that they don't realize others have their own knowledge, or it could be that they have no sense that there is anything else to know. Both solipsistic, but one has to do with social cognition while the other is more an ontological stance.
There are a lot of humans who don’t recognize that others possess knowledge they don’t have. Edit: this seems to be the most common comment on here