Friday, December 7, 2007

Final Reflection

Unfortunately, in my quest for blogs germane to my topic, I was unable to find any focused on chimpanzee language. Nevertheless, in terms of furthering academic inquiry, I can definitely see uses for “Academic Blogging” with regards to my topic and the field of psychology. Because of the lack of a single methodology in studies assessing the linguistic capabilities of chimpanzees, it has been difficult to make any generalizations. However, blogs would allow for different people to share new ideas and recent studies. For example, someone who sees my blog could do further research on the studies I have mentioned. Additionally, I put forward some interesting questions about this issue that someone may want to elaborate on in their own research. Another important issue to consider is the timeliness of blogs. Responses to new studies can often take months to publish. Academic blogs are an environment in which researchers can debate and present opposing views in an educated and informed manner all in a matter of time. Most importantly, blogs allow us to see the way in which people make different connections with the available research. This is especially important with this issue because as I have mentioned before, there are still plenty of questions to be answered and more research to be done.

With regards to this topic, I don’t intend on continuing my blog due to lack of time. However, I do see myself using this approach again in the near future for long-term academic research papers. This blog gave me the opportunity to make connections and develop new ideas for my paper. Most importantly, I was able to practice putting down these ideas into words that the average academic reader would understand. Final thoughts: I hope this blog will be useful to other students that intend on doing research on this topic. If I receive any feedback I will gladly respond.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Recent Studies

A number of studies have been done in which scientists have taught a chimpanzee to use lexigrams or American Sign Language. Unfortunately, the most recent of these studies are from the late 80’s. Considering the need for current research, I decided to look at other recent studies that look at the minds of chimpanzees. Although these new studies are not directly related to language, they still provide knowledge about the cognitive capabilities of chimpanzees and thus widen the possibility for symbolic language.

As mentioned previously, researchers have long accused chimpanzees of imitation in their displays of language. However, a 2003 study on social learning by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten (“Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees”) revealed that children are more likely to imitate than chimpanzees. Horner and Whiten set up an experiment in which “a human demonstrator use[d] a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box.” In particular, the study makes note to distinguish between emulation, “a process whereby through watching a model, an observer learns about the results of actions, rather than details about the behaviors involved” and imitation, the act of “produc[ing] a recognizable (if not accurate) copy of the original behavior required to bring about the same result as the model.” The results showed that chimpanzees were more likely to emulate the actions of the human demonstrator. In contrast, children were more involved with direct imitation.

In “College Students Meet Match in Chimpanzee,” Malcolm Ritter discusses a study done this year that also looks at the cognitive capacity of chimpanzees. In this experiment, numbers were quickly flashed on the screen and then rapidly replaced by white squares. The job of the participants was to touch the squares in the proper order. The results showed that compared to Japanese college students, the chimpanzees showed better short-term memory. As Ritter points out, this new study “challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that ‘humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.’” The aforementioned studies make it a lot easier to believe that complex language in chimpanzees isn’t so ludicrous after all.