This from the Linguist Digest:
LINGUIST List: Vol-6-250. Sat 18 Feb 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 131
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Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 11:38:17 -0600
From: Condon Sherri L (slc6859@usl.edu)
Subject: Re: 6.189 Innateness/ Language & Species
For readers interested in questions about the cognitive capabilities of
primates, I would like to recommend taking a look at the work of a
colleague in our cognitive science program, Daniel Povinelli. While he
has nothing to say about language, he has been involved in the work on
self-recognition in primates and human children, pointing out some
striking developmental parallels. At the same time, his work stands as
an important caution against anthropomorphizing even the simplest primate
behavior. For example, chimps track an experimenter's gaze (looking in
the direction that the experimenter is viewing), which for humans can
involve reasoning about the mental states of the gazer (e.g. that the
gazer's attention is focused on something in the direction of the gaze,
that the gazer does not see other things not in his or her line of
vision, etc.). Yet, faced with two experimenters, one gazing in a
direction away from the chimp and the other looking toward the chimp,
chimps frequently track the gaze but are equally likely to gesture at
either for a food reward. Therefore, while chimps seem to have evolved a
behavior of tracking gazes (human infants do, too), they do not seem to
have developed an appreciation of seeing as an attentional/intention
mental event that subjectively connects organisms to the external world.
(This, of course was only one of a series of studies in which chimps
failed to select an experimenter who could see them as opposed to one who
could not.)
I think we have much to learn about cognition and communication in all
species, and we are fortunate that careful researchers are on the job!
The results I mentioned above are reported in a monograph that presents
results from both chimps and human children (though sometimes I feel
that my twin boys, who participated in some of the studies, should have
been grouped with the chimps). I'm not sure it is out yet, but look
for _What Young Chimpanzees Know about Seeing_ by Daniel J. Povinelli
and Timothy J. Eddy. They can be contacted at
Laboratory of Comparative Behavioral Biology
University of Southwestern Louisiana
New Iberial Research Center
100 Avenue D.
New Iberia, LA 70560
(318) 365-2411
(I'm still trying to talk him into getting an e-mail address.)
Some other sources:
Povinelli, D.J. (1993) Reconstructing the evolution of mind. American
Psychologist, 48, 493-509.
Povinelli, D.J., Nelson, K.E. & Boysen, S.T. (1990) Inferences about
guessing and knowing by chimpanzees. Journal of Comparative Psychology,
104, 203-210.
Povinelli, D.J., Landau, A.R., & Bierschwale, D.T. (1993) Self-recognition
in chimpanzees: Distribution, ontogeny, and patterns of emergence.
Journal of Comprative Psychology, 107, 347-372.
Enjoy,
Sherri Condon
Universite' des Acadiens
(University of Southwestern Louisiana)
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If this about gaze interpretation is a valid observation, it might well
be related to the apparent inability of primates to pick up on the manner
in which a tool is used-- the old saw about "monkey see, monkey do"
notwithstanding. The claim seems to be that the primates don't make an
attribution of "motivation like mine" for doing X, which I might do.
Bruce