Showing posts with label Chimpanzees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chimpanzees. Show all posts

Can I Give You A Hand?


Many studies have been done that show how one member of a species reacts to another of the same species and these indicate that many species show empathy or, in some cases, altruism. Of course these are all social animals, so it doesn’t seem very surprising that a member of a group would be well aware of what its colleagues are up too.

Cooperation and awareness are key requirements of a social group that benefits from being in a group over and above being a smaller part of the general target for predators. However, aiding a colleague with no expectation other than they may be paying it forward, so to speak is indicative of a sophisticated cognitive process that is worthy of study.

Yamamoto et al studied mother chimpanzees and their offspring helping each other on request and wrote up the work for this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1). With this experiment, mother and offspring were in different rooms with a pass through. In one room was a drink that needed a straw to get at the fruit juice. The other room had a selection of seven different ‘tools,’ one of which was a straw.

The chimps with the tools were good at finding the straw and handing it over when requested. However when the drink was hidden from the tool stockiest, they tended to hand out the wrong tool. A walking stick was a favorite, but it wouldn't help with drinking juice.

The general conclusions from the study were that chimpanzees will help when requested, but only when requested. They are quite happy to watch the other struggle if not asked to help. Maybe that’s not that surprising when we remember how closely our DNA tells us we are related.

However, like us, when asked they will often step up to the plate and hand out tools. Unfortunately, they don’t have our language skills and the helper has to see what the problem is if they are going to be of any use.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/30/1108517109.full.pdf



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Getting Small-minded


As we get older we look wrinkly on the outside, although we feel pretty much the same inside, but at some point, we start to suffer from a lack of velocity. As we gradually improve medical methodologies, our life expectancy increases, if and only if, we can still move fast enough to cross the road before the faster and faster cars catch us.

A question we could ask, but never do, of course, is how old are we supposed to get? If you are a cat or a dog 15 to 20 is pretty much all you can expect. If a macaw, maybe 70, but if a giant tortoise you could be looking at 150 to 200 years of silly politics. So where do we fit in?

Back to our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, 50 years old is about it, and they don’t have to put up with the stress of studying stock market fluctuations. Sherwood et al in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy have attacked this question of comparisons by using MRI scans of chimpanzee and our brains (1).

Looking at almost a hundred chimpanzees of a range of age from young to old, they found that their brain volumes were pretty constant. Well perhaps that’s a slight overstatement if one looks at the data, but there wasn’t a trend for loss of their little grey cells with age.

Not so with us humans though. With almost as many humans from 22 to 88, the brain scan showed that we were losing cells on the way to become small-minded with age. The authors point out that we are unusual in this rather careless habit (and another recent paper has shown that its not due to the demon drink) as other species don’t appear to do this and have their hippocampus and frontal lobes shrink.

Interestingly, their conclusion is that, maybe, we have reached our sell by date when our brain starts to shrink. Evolutionwise, we should have popped off by then and our extended lifespan is to blame. Philosophically, this seems to me to be a very scary thought to follow down its rabbit hole. Should monitoring changes in our brain volume become as routine as measuring our changes in cholesterol or blood glucose? Would that information be useful to health insurance providers?

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13029

Prosocialism


For a long time now, chimpanzees have been getting a bad rap. On the one hand we recognize that DNA-wise they are our closest match in the animal world, but our treatment of them has left a lot to be desired. At one time we had them on the stage as youngsters having a tea party while being dressed up as human kids. We have even worked at teaching them to understand what we’re saying with well known characters like Washo.

More recently we have TV documentaries showing them as non-cuddly, sometimes predatory thug-like characters who could be modeling themselves on Puzo’s Godfather character.

At the same time, we recognize that humans have a strong prosocial or altruistic  streak and we give generously (perhaps) to others who have suffered in a natural disaster. We’re less eager if it’s our fellow citizens in terms of regularizing that altruism via our government, especially if we are having our own regular tea parties, but we agree that monkeys, such as macaques, behave with a marked degree of altruism.

The received wisdom is that chimpanzees don’t. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Horner et al from Emory U has at last shed doubt on that notion (1).  They indicate that the previous testing methods are probably the reason that great notion was flawed.

The recent study was done with 7 female chimpanzees and they had to choose a token for treats. The choice was between two tokens of different color. One color provided one helping of treats, while the other color provided two helpings so that the other chimp in the room could indulge too.

The chimp girls showed a propensity for going for the two-helping token so they could share with their cell-mate. Interestingly though, if they were bunking with a greedy, whiney cell-mate, they went for the single treat token and had to be pleaded with and pestered to go for double treats.

 So maybe, just maybe, that 2% DNA difference is smaller than we thought.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/01/1111088108.abstract

Working For Peanuts


The family of great apes, the orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, share almost all their genetic code with each other and us. I have even been told that men are genetically closer to male chimpanzees than women (because of the Y-chromosome), but I suspect that was more in the spirit of a put-down than a scientific classification.

Over recent years, we have come to respect their intelligence more and more. We never tire of devising new challenges for them in their captive environment. Hanus et al from the Max Planck in Leipzig have just challenged a group of great apes to compete with children at ages 4, 6 and 8 years old with “the floating peanut test”(1). Some of the apes were lab. captive and others were in sheltered accommodation in a reserves in Uganda and Indonesia. The children, on the other hand, were quite free-range and were coralled from local kindergartens and primary schools.

The test consists of a peanut in a clear acrylic tube strapped very firmly to the wall and the subject has to devise a means to retrieve it. They have access to water but no electric saws or drills.  The solution to the problem is to float the peanut out with water so they could eat it.

The gorillas didn’t cope with this at all. Perhaps a solitary peanut doesn’t look much like a treat to a large gorilla suffering from middle-aged spread. The other problem for the apes is that they had to carry the water in their mouth and spit it into the top of the tube. Rather difficult with a face shaped like an ape and a narrow tube strapped to a wall. They had to do a lot of supping and spitting to add enough water.

The Orangs were in a care Center in Indonesia and didn’t do well either. This was a surprise as a previous group in Leipzig had been quite good at it. 20% of the chimpanzees got their nuts.

So how did the kids do? They didn’t have to spit as they had water in a pitcher in the room. Well, the 4-year olds didn’t do as well as the chimps with only 8% getting their nut. Six year olds did better with a 50% success rate. This rate increased to nearly sixty percent with 8-year olds.

My question is why did 40% of 8-year olds fail? Was the reward too small and their expectations too high?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019555;jsessionid=1A8937E918CEB8B9FF571EB88565ACCA.ambra02

Empathetically Yours


We all have a group of friends or relatives who make up our social circus and keep us entertained and happy. Our ingroup in psychological terminology, the members of which we feel empathy for and we laugh or cry with them. Other groups that we don’t know are out groups and here our empathy can be pretty thin.Empathy makes actions like laughing or crying a great deal more infectious. Hence, if we are a stand-up comedian or a politician – sorry for repeating myself just then– it is wise to stack the audience with some friends. 

Yawning too is infectious, as I have found to my cost when lecturing. The student classmates are an ingroup, and yawns can spread through my audience like wildfire. However, the yawning contagion isn’t confined to familiars with humans, strangers can catch it too.

So it is with dogs. The infectiousness of yawning goes wider than the ingroup. Dog empathy goes wider that just their friends. But then many dogs seem to be optimists and expect me to make a fuss of them without us having been formally introduced.

So what about Chimpanzees? Well Campbell and de Waal of Emory U have just published a study (1). Here a group of chimpanzees were shown videos of familiars and unfamiliars yawning. Although they were very interested in the unfamiliar chimps and trying to see if they checked with someone in a rogues gallery, they didn’t catch as many yawns as when they saw videos of their friends and relations yawning.

Note though that yawns from any of the chimp body were infectious. In an earlier paper (2) Campbell et al reported that chimps also caught yawns from 3-D chimp avatars. Must have been a pretty bad movie if even the avatars were yawning.



1.    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018283
2.   Campbell et al.,Proc. of the Roy. Soc., Biological Sciences 276: 4255–4259