He helped her healing. Morin: Does a gorilla smile look the same as a human smile? If you see a gorilla smile you can definitely identify it though.
Morin: Do you think that gorillas have a theory of mind? It's a very adaptive ability to have and probably rather widespread. For example, I went to a conference in Indonesia, and we went out to look for proboscis monkeys.
We were able to identify a few, but as we moved, they disappeared almost instantly. They shifted their body positions so that we couldn't see them at any given point. Very protective of course. Morin: How does primate cognition compare to that of humans? Morin: We talked about theory of mind. I want to ask about self-awareness.
I understand that Koko passed the mirror self-recognition test. Can you describe that process? In the beginning, she looked behind the mirror for the other gorilla, but eventually came to use it as a tool and to groom herself and do all the activities that people do. Eventually, we did a formal test where she got marked. I did the same thing with Michael. He was used to being washed with a washcloth, but this time we secretly put pink paint on it to mark him. When he looked in the mirror, he was shocked.
I realized it look like his forehead had been ripped open. Morin: He believed he was wounded then? How would he know what that looked like? He described that on camera once, actually. They were nonstandard gestures. Morin: Did he seem traumatized by that experience? Anytime a male worker came around, especially those doing tree work, he would just run over and scream at them.
We don't know what happened. He also would scream in the middle of the night in his nightmares. Morin: Did he ever communicate the substance of those nightmares? Has Koko shared any with you? They saturated the media with ads that were very graphic with dinosaurs eating humans and all kinds of things. Well, Koko saw them, and several days later one of our caregivers reported her acting very strangely towards her toy dinosaurs and alligators.
She was acting as though they were real, and was very frightened of them, and didn't want to touch them. She was using tools to get them away from her. I do believe she had a nightmare about them. Morin: Does she move around in her sleep or make vocalizations that lead you to believe that she's dreaming?
Morin: You mentioned before in the case of Barbara Weller that Michael saw her as a kind of mother. Do you feel that way with Koko? I would much prefer to have a baby gorilla than a baby human. She takes on that role with her kittens. She tries to hold them up to nurse, but of course she doesn't understand the mechanics of that. We've tried to set up a family situation where that would work, but one-on-one is not a social unit for gorillas.
Morin: What kinds of research are you currently working on with Koko? Not just things with words, but positioning objects over time. I forgot to mention that in terms of time. I noticed once that Koko somehow had put a cover over a small table [in her room] and the underneath part was private. The first thing that appeared under there was a Koko doll that we had made for her—a plush gorilla.
The next day I came in, there was a larger gorilla doll next to it. The next day, there was a baby in between them. So, she told a story. Michael was the big storyteller. Morin: He had a moral judgment about killing? Look what happened to him and his family, and cats are doing the same things—killing others and eating them. Bob Ingersoll is a primatologist who worked with Washoe and Nim.
He described how Deaf people interacted with them:. It was to me a very moving experience because there was clearly a recognition by both the humans and the apes that they were conversations going on. I saw one young lady a native signer actually shed tears when she realized that Washoe understood what the young lady had signed to her and Washoe had responded.
We could and should have done this right from the start and I found it almost demeaning that the community that actually has the most knowledge of this topic were not included as equal partners right from the start. My sympathies were always with the deaf community and the chimps who it seemed to me were being used as tools for science which was to me just wrong.
While these were massive breakthroughs, no primate has ever learned sign language. No matter how many signs they learn grammar eluded them. What they learned was a lexicon to beg for things from their human carers. They barely studied grammar especially ASL grammar and expected first generation learners with no evolutionary background in language to produce grammatical sentences based on spoken English.
I think that was foolish and bad science and unfair to two groups. In second and third generation studies some of those concerns were addressed but many studies were one and done so to speak which to me was unfair and inadequate. There are combinations of those five words, none of them grammatically correct.
By , Terrace had videoed 20, examples of Nim signing and had come to the conclusion that Nim had not grasped the concept of grammar:. This is in marked contrast to children whose sentences get longer as their vocabulary expands. Only a handful of the tasks these apes were being asked to do were dependent on grammatical word order and of those that were, the apes only understood them c. See if that really appears to be language.
Somewhere in the history of our kind there must have been the first beings who could rearrange tokens to create new meanings, to distinguish Me Banana from Banana Me. But the evidence from many years of training apes to press buttons or sign in ASL, is that this must have happened sometime after we split off from chimps, bonobos, and gorillas. However, many people were impressed by her communication prowess.
It's not a set of crude gestures that your captive ape can master. The information is misleading. Please double-check your facts. University of Birmingham's Dr Adam Schembri said the headlines need " to be worded with care to avoid crating a misleading impression. We mastered ASL, not Koko. Marcus Perlman, a linguist, who studied Koko as part of his research into ape communication, weighed in.
I would say that Koko used an inventory of learned, conventional gestures to communicate effectively with her caregivers about her daily life. Many of her gestures were derived from ASL signs.
But yes - Koko certainly did not master anything like a sign language. Gerardo Ortega, a sign language researcher, said Koko never mastered sign language. He tweeted: "At most she ritualised the use of some signs about the here and now and used them only after trainer promoted her. However, some sign language users see things differently, especially some people who said she inspired them to learn sign language. I watched a documentary about her and she drove me to learn sign language to communicate to my friends who are deaf.
As someone whose parents were deaf and is fluent in ASL, I find the reverence for Koko and her speaking sign language fascinating. Speaking sign language has always felt perceived as more prestigious than other languages, at least in my experience.
And the apes did learn to use some hand gestures in this way.
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