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http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0603/02chimps.html

06/02/03

Chimps get good report card 

By BILL HENDRICK 
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

Chimps aren't chumps -- not by a long shot -- and are surprisingly good at 
math as well
as verbal skills, according to research presented in Atlanta during the 
annual meeting of
the American Psychological Society, which ended Sunday.

Psychologist Michael J. Beran of Georgia State University's Language Research 
Center
found in an experiment involving four chimps that all were adept at addition.

Experimenters put bananas in two separate opaque containers at varying 
intervals as the
four chimps watched, in separate experiments. To avoid tipping their hand to 
the chimps,
different humans put the fruit in the containers so that the animals wouldn't 
jump to
conclusions about which people might be most generous.

And at the end, all four chimps were able to tell which container contained 
the most
bananas.

"The performance of these animals matched that of children up to 4 years of 
age," Beran
said. "These chimpanzees provided the first demonstration by nonhuman animals 
of extended
memory for arithmetic manipulations."

"Why do we care?" Beran asked. "Because these experiments give us clues about 
the
evolutionary process that led to human mathematical skills. Human kids take a 
long time
to learn math, but all of a sudden, they're counting everything."

He said the chimps displayed an "important survival skill" -- the ability to 
figure out
which containers held the most bananas.

Three of the four chimps -- Lana 32, Sherman, 29, and Panzee, 17 -- have been 
trained to
use lexigrams, or symbols representing words and actions, to communicate with 
handlers.
The fourth, Mercury, 16, hasn't been taught to communicate. The fact that he 
also could
add up bananas indicates language training isn't related to math skills, 
Beran said.

His research is slated for publication later this year in Psychological 
Science, the
premier journal of the APS.

One of his colleagues, Charles R. Menzel, found in another study presented at 
the
convention that one of the chimps was able to remember where objects are 
located long
after they were hidden by handlers.

"This is a chimpanzee that knows more than 100 lexigrams that refer to 
objects, actions
and locations," Menzel said. "This female, Panzee, was able to remember where 
objects
were hidden and interact indoors with a person who doesn't know.

"The chimp, on her own initiative, uses vocalization and gestures to capture 
the person's
attention and then will touch the lexigrams corresponding to the type of 
object that's
hidden. Then she'll direct the person to the hidden object, outside her 
enclosure.

"The important thing is she can retrieve the information and convey the 
information about
what she saw after overnight delays of more than 16 hours," Menzel said. "The 
chimp
couldn't do this if she didn't know the lexigram keyboard."

Beran said he wasn't surprised late last month when scientists said chimps 
are closer to
humans genetically than to gorillas and other apes, and that they should be 
sharing space
on the same branch of the family tree.

"I think we've sensed that at the language lab for a long time," he laughed. 
"Chimps are
pretty smart, and they're going to teach us a lot about ourselves."