Researchers say baboons can reason

IOWA CITY, Iowa, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Researchers in Iowa and France, working with two baboon subjects, believe they have shown the animals are capable of some degree of abstract thought.

Up until this study, some researchers maintained only chimpanzees and humans have this conceptual capacity. But study author Michael E. Young, told United Press International: "This claim no longer holds. Our study clearly shows that baboons can match relations."

Some researchers are "trying to find a way to explain our quite remarkable results without granting analogical conceptual capacity to the lowly baboon," said Young, who was part of the team at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He now is a researcher at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

The baboons were able to learn that a computer screen containing many repetitive images of one object better matched a second screen of repetitive images of a second object than a screen with the same number of images, but all of the images of different objects. For example, 16 identical cars better matched 16 identical houses, rather than 16 images total of a telephone, a tree, a star and 13 other objects.

The baboons were then presented with images they had not seen before. They first were shown a screen that had repetitions of one object. That screen ended and they were shown two displays at the same time, one containing repetitions of another single object and one that showed 16 different objects. The baboon used a control stick to point to the display of images that matched the one previously shown. In this example it would be the second screen of repetitions of one object.

Being able to identify the correct screen -- matching all-same with all-same in this example -- was considered to be a successful match. The task required the baboons to recognize that two collections are similar because of the relation between the items, not the items themselves.

The baboons succeeded even if they had not seen any of the specific object images in previous test runs. The researchers say this shows some degree of abstract thought is occurring because the baboons are learning to generalize and see the difference between all-the-same and all -different in a general sense, regardless of the specific objects involved.

Some experts agree that abstract conceptualization by the baboons has been demonstrated. However, even the researchers themselves note the patterns created by the images may play a role and their paper focuses on that aspect. They show that as the overall pattern created by the images was weakened, by putting fewer and fewer images on the page, the baboons performed more poorly and required more training to get the right answer and, perhaps most important, to the baboon at least, the banana food pellet that rewarded success.

The researchers refer to this capacity as having the ability to see "the relation between relations" and concluded, "The results suggest that animals other than humans and chimpanzees can discriminate the relations between relations." Chimpanzees had previously been demonstrated to have this capacity.

Anthony A. Wright, professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, said the researchers "show a convincing demonstration that some species other than humans can reason by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is the ability to identify similar relationships."

Robert Sapolsky an associate professor of neuroendocrinology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., has studied baboons for 23 years.

"This doesn't surprise me. I'm not surprised that they are able to perform a task like this, and I also wouldn't be surprised if other non-ape primates, and maybe even some non-primates could do this as well. I'm also not surprised that, nonetheless, it took them an enormous number of trials to master this," Sapolsky told UPI.

But not everyone is convinced. According to Mary Jo Ratterman, assistant professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall in Lancaster, Pa., the poorer performance with fewer images in the array signals that some other factor may be operating.

"I'm simply not convinced that these nonhuman primates are truly matching based on the conceptual relation of identity," Ratterman told UPI.

The research was done at the Center of Research in Cognitive Neurosciences in Marseille, France, and at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. The paper, titled, "Discriminating the relation between relations: The role of entropy in abstract conceptualization by baboon (Papio papio) and Humans (Homo sapiens)," appears in the October issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, published by the American Psychological Association.

--

(Reported by Joe Grossman in Santa Cruz, Calif.)