GettyImages-140472681.jpg Past Christian Jarrett

Psychologists take long studied chimps and other animals with two principal, related aims: to find out the capabilities of the animal mind, and to observe what makes us truly unique, if annihilation. This is a challenging field. As any pet owner knows, it's tempting to project a human interpretation onto brute behaviour. Researchers, especially when they've spent many years studying the same creature, tin autumn victim to this very bias (you'll see a theme of this field is the powerful, close bonds oftentimes formed between psychologist and animal). At the same time, though, there is also a temptation to overestimate our homo uniqueness. Which emotions and capabilities are exclusively man? Tool use, perspective taking and cant were one time contenders, simply no more, and the list is getting shorter all the time.

This Digest feature mail is a celebration of the contribution that animals have made to psychology, including 8 that we've come to know on first-proper name terms:

Hans the Horse

CleverHans.jpg

The extent to which animals are truly capable of human being-similar intelligence has dogged psychologists for over a hundred years. A equus caballus nicknamed Clever Hans (Der Kluge Hans in his native natural language) seemed to respond that question in dramatic manner through his public performances in Berlin in early 1900s. Trained by a maths teacher Wilhelm Von Ofsten for iv years, Hans appeared not simply capable of simple arithmetic and telling the time, but by using hoof taps to represent to letters, he performed fifty-fifty more than astonishing feats, similar identifying artists from their paintings or the composers of melodies. The German board of Instruction launched an 18-month long enquiry and found no prove of fraud. However, the psychologist Oscar Pfungst eventually deduced that Hans must be reading tell-tale cues from whomever was questioning him considering he could only respond correctly when his interrogator was visible.

This revelation highlighted some of the problems that take plagued animal psychology research ever since. Animals are highly receptive to human cues and many fauna behaviours that seem impressive on the surface – and which seem to reveal circuitous animal noesis – may often have a simpler caption (though Hans' ability to read cues, fifty-fifty when humans tried to conceal them, remains an incredible feat in itself). Unfortunately, the story ends sadly. Hans was recruited into the German language war endeavor and, depending on which account you believe, was killed in action or eaten past hungry soldiers.

Pavlov's Dogs

I'm cheating a little with this (and the final) entry by including a group of famous animals rather than an individual, but it just seems right to mention the dogs studied by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov given their contribution to psychology. The reason Pavlov's dogs characteristic in almost every introductory psychology class and textbook is considering they revolutionised our understanding of learning, especially the principle of classical conditioning (detailed in a archetype paper from 1927). Pavlov discovered classical conditioning about by accident, when he noticed that his enquiry dogs salivated when they heard cues that indicated to them that dinner was on the manner. Pavlov before long found that he could get the dogs to salivate in response to well-nigh whatever kind of previously meaningless cue, such as a bong, but past pairing the bell repeatedly with the inflow of food. A challenge for later psychology research has frequently been to prove that something more than basic learning processes, such as classical conditioning, are at play when animals perform apparently impressive feats of man-similar intelligence.

Washoe the Chimp

A long-running question in animate being psychology has been whether human language can be taught to animals. Early on in the last century, one thought was that our primate cousins might well be capable of homo language if only they were raised in man culture. This prompted the wife and husband team of Luella and Winthrop Kellogg to raise the chimp Gua in their home alongside their son. It concluded in failure of form, with Gua unable to speak. Decades later on – it's foreign it took so long – creature researchers realised non-homo primates would never speak because of the anatomy of their rima oris and vocal chords.

Recognition of this anatomical fact led to an intense menses of several decades of work that attempted to teach apes sign language and, later on, communication by symbols on a picture board. The showtime chimp to be taught sign linguistic communication was Washoe (hence why I've chosen her for this listing, rather than other famous research chimps including Kanzi and Nim Chimpsky). Washoe hailed from West Africa and was adopted by some other spousal psychologist team, Allen and Beatrix Gardner. Washoe eventually learned to utilize over 250 dissimilar signs (her obituary in the New York Times in 2007 was headlined: Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42). There is disagreement over whether Washoe ever really invented new words, such every bit the time she allegedly signed "water", "bird" at the sight of a swan. Still, witnessing this apparent linguistic improvisation was according to at least one commentator (Harvard psychologist Roger Brown) "like getting an SOS from outer space".

Koko the Gorilla

Most of the ape language studies have involved chimps, but one peculiarly famous exception is Koko the Gorilla, who has been taught sign language (and exposed to spoken English language) for decades by the psychologist Francine "Penny" Patterson. A few years agone Koko fabricated headlines around the world when it was declared by the Gorilla Foundation in California that she was mourning the passing of actor and comedian Robin Williams, who she'd met for an afternoon in 2001. A YouTube clip of their see (run into above) has been viewed over three million times. Koko has as well starred in her own books, including a children's book, Koko'due south Kitten, and been the subject of several motion picture documentaries, near recently a BBC plan,Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks To People. "What we can actually learn from this extraordinary science experiment turned dear thing?" asks the movie, highlighting in a nutshell i cardinal trouble with this entire field – the emotional closeness between researchers and the animals they study, challenging the pursuit of scientific objectivity.

The sad matter about the story of Koko and the other apes made famous by their part in psychological study is that the whole field has crashed, not only because of methodological criticism (most notably a devastating critique published in Scientific discipline in 1979 by Herbert Terrace, leader of the Nim Chimpsky project, in which he argued that ape language is not human-like and doesn't characteristic real syntax), but also amongst accusations of beast mistreatment. A contempo Slate article summed upward the situation: "No new studies have been launched in years, and the old ones are fizzling out. A backside-the-scenes look at what remains of this research today reveals a surprisingly dramatic world of lawsuits, mass resignations, and dysfunctional relationships betwixt humans and apes." Similarly, a major new paper in Almanac Reviews of Anthropology by Don Kulick says, "The threadbare field left today is an alarming not-and so-funhouse of intrigue, betrayal, accusation, threats, litigation, dismissals, obese apes (unsurprising when most of their signing seems to be concerned with obtaining food rewards), expressionless apes, mass resignations, and even, inevitably, sex."

Peter the Dolphin

Sexual activity is besides a surprising theme of dolphin inquiry that took place in the 1960s at a lab known as Dolphin Business firm, congenital on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas. There, John Lilley and his wife conducted investigations into whether dolphins are capable of mimicking man speech, and later on into the effects of LSD on dolphins (to their surprise, the drug seemed to have no effect). Equally office of the language enquiry, a woman called Margaret Howe Lovatt moved into a peculiarly designed dolphinarium with a young male person dolphin called Peter, living at that place more or less 24 hours a day in an office that overhang his h2o tank. The thought was that with constant human contact, it would peradventure be possible for a dolphin to fully grasp and imitate human being language.

1 trouble: the pup's burgeoning sexual needs began to interrupt the language lessons. At start Peter was intermittently relocated to spend time with female dolphins in some other tank, but Lovatt establish that this interfered too much with her research and the bond she was trying to found. So she began to satisfy Peter'south needs herself. "It wasn't sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps," she told Christopher Riley, the producer and managing director of the BBC documentary The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins. "It seemed to me that it made the bond closer," she continued. "Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that's really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter."

This isn't simply an odd tale, merely a sad one. As Lovatt's experiment was coming to an end, news came that funding was being withdrawn from the lab (Riley says this is because of wider concerns nearly the welfare of all the resident dolphins). The following year, Dolphin House lab was forced to shut. The story goes that later being moved to claustrophobic surroundings in Miami, Peter took his own life.

Alex the Parrot

Language skills and a keen intelligence are not but the preserve of apes and dolphins, equally shown – to many experts' surprise at the fourth dimension – by the remarkable achievements of the African Grey parrot Alex (an acronym for "Avian Learning Experiment"), who was studied for 30 years by the psychologist Irene Pepperberg, until the parrot's death in 2007 at the age of 31.

Pepperberg, who bought Alex from a pet shop in 1977, was apparently inspired to study Alex because she'd read about the linguistic achievements of Washoe (see above) and other animals. As well as beingness famous for his one liners, Alex obviously learned over 100 words, could name over 50 objects and knew his colours and shapes. He starred in several BBC and PBS documentaries. Similar many of his ape peers in the research globe, Alex also received notable obituaries upon his expiry. The Economist referred to him as science's "best known parrot". The New York Times ran with "Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive To The End", in reference to the fact that Alex's last words to Pepperberg the dark he died were "Y'all be good, see you tomorrow. I honey you."

Compared with his ape peers, it seems that Alex contributed to research that is more than probable to stand up the test of time. He featured in dozens of quality peer-reviewed papers past Pepperberg (by contrast, it'south over 20 years since the on-going Koko project published a significant linguistic communication newspaper in a peer-reviewed journal, and that was in the Russian Journal of Foreign Psychology). In his recent review of human-creature communication, anthropologist Don Kulick wrote the "… emphasis on noesis and downplaying of linguistic communication seem to have protected Pepperberg's studies [of Alex] from the sort of critical onslaught that pulverized ape-language research".

Betty the Crow

Alex is far from being the simply smart bird in town. Betty, the New Caledonian crow, though less famous than the parrot, made headlines around the globe in 2002 when it was reported that she had shown the ingenuity to make a hook out of a straight piece of wire, to accomplish nutrient in a plastic tube (some other crow had taken off with the claw provided past the researchers). This was considered a big deal considering, as one of the researchers told the BBC, "Although many animals utilise tools, purposeful modification of objects to solve new problems, without training or prior feel, is nearly unknown". In fact, the researchers claimed Betty'southward tool-making was more impressive than the tool utilize seen among chimps.

However, as is unremarkably the manner with animal research of this kind, doubts take since been raised virtually the manner Betty's feat was interpreted. Last year, a different team of researchers studied eighteen New Caledonian crows as they made tools with the branches they apply in the wild. Crucially, the researchers observed that most of the birds performed the same final modification – to create a hook shape – equally seen by Betty in the lab. In other words, Betty'due south feat was not entirely spontaneous, but probably part of her species' natural repertoire. Meanwhile, while nosotros're talking about corvids, an honourable mention should get to psychologist Nicky Clayton'due south scrub-jays, who have been observed demonstrating many behaviours previously considered uniquely man, such as advanced cant. For instance, a jay volition re-hide her food stash if a potential thief was nearby when she first hid it.

Attorney the Edge Collie

Not to exist outdone by the birds and the apes, a dog named Chaser the Border Collie can reportedly recognise over 1000 words, having been trained extensively through play by the psychologists Alliston Reid and John Pilley. "We have found that play is infinitely greater than nutrient [for training]. It'south not as distracting and dogs don't satiate on play" says Pilley in a promotional video (see above) for his New York Times best-selling volume, Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of The God Who Knows a Thousand Words. Are Chaser's skills an case of true animal intelligence? Pilley thinks so: "These kind of findings definitely testify that lower animals, particularly dogs, are not machines with blood. They have emotions, they have mental processes." But again, anyone watching Pilley with his research subject will come across the common problem of an emotional bond between scientist and brute, potentially blurring objectivity and making it hard to interpret research findings. That said, in the formal published paper detailing Attorney's achievements, Pilley claims to have ruled out the possibility that Chaser relies on visual cues, "Clever Hans mode".  Chaser's fame continues to grow through regular documentary appearances, including on sixty Minutes and National Geographic and on the BBC.

Echo the Elephant

Echo the elephant died in 2009 at the historic period of 64 having been filmed and observed in Kenya's Amboseli National Park for several decades, making her the world's nigh studied elephant (although, strictly speaking she was the subject field of ethological rather than psychological study). Echo, who was her tribe'south matriarch for about 36 years, starred in at least iv documentaries, including David Attenborough'south Echo: An Unforgettable Elephant. The principal researcher was ethologist Cynthia Moss who, like many of the other researchers mentioned in this list, formed a powerful emotional bond with Repeat. Moss learned from Echo and the other elephants of Amboseli most their emotional lives, their transmission of cultural practices and their capacity for hereafter planning and teamwork. This is illustrated in the clip higher up, in which Echo marshals the support of her tribe's developed females to execute an apparently daring rescue of her daughter, Ebony, who had been kidnapped by a rival tribe.

Harlow's Monkeys

I'm going to cheat again for this last entry and rather than name a specific creature, include a group of animals who helped us amend understand a fundamental fact near ourselves.

The importance of physical touch betwixt mother and babe is today widely recognised, but back in the 1950s this wasn't the example, thanks in role to the influence of Freud and his ideas that an infant bonds with her mother primarily considering she satisfies her basic needs of thirst and hunger. The American psychologist Harry Harlow's research in the 1950s with rhesus monkeys changed this. Though ethically controversial, information technology provided a powerful demonstration of the importance of physical contact in mother-infant attachment.

Inspired past his ascertainment that monkeys separated from their mothers grew highly attached to and possessive of their blankets, Harlow created two forms of surrogate mother: one made of wire that provided milk, some other warm and soft that provided comfort but no milk. Given the choice, infant monkeys spent the bulk of their time with the soft, warm version. However, without their mothers, even the monkeys who clinged to the material-covered surrogates developed serious behavioural issues subsequently, lending graphic evidence to support the British psychologist John Bowlby's claims about the importance of early maternal care.

Which animals would y'all take included on this list and why? Answers via comments or tweet us @ResearchDigest #famouspsychologyanimals

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Christian Jarrett ( @Psych_Writer) is Editor ofBPS Research Digest and the owner of an adorable miniature schnauzer called Crimson, who understands 2 words, dinner and walkies.