We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. CHICAGO — When the frozen blueberry rolled out of a tube near a inch touch-screen computer in the Lincoln Park Zoo's great ape house, a lowland gorilla named Rollie popped the berry into her mouth, gleefully stomped her feet and let out a celebratory hoot.
Rollie had correctly solved a seven-step number puzzle on the screen, winning a treat and an enthusiastic cheer from a keeper. But her skills are also being noticed outside the confines of the zoo. Conventional wisdom has it that gorillas are somewhat less intelligent than their great ape cousins.
Rollie's surprising success at her morning research routine is challenging those assumptions, suggesting she might in fact be faster on the uptake than chimpanzees and orangutans. A report on her work recently caused a stir at the biennial meeting of the International Primatological Society Congress in Scotland.
Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. Ross' immediate aim in studying primate cognition and intelligence is to devise preference tests that allow animals to "talk" to keepers, expressing what foods they like and don't like and reporting on good and bad features of their habitats.
But exploring animal cognition also is a way of looking at the history of human intellect and language, giving insights into how they evolved. Chimpanzees and orangutans are studied often at primate and medical research laboratories worldwide. But captive gorillas — perhaps too temperamental as adults to be used as research subjects — aren't often kept outside of zoos, so they are far less studied.
Lincoln Park, in fact, is the only place in the world that is doing touch-screen testing with both chimps and gorillas.
Ross first started training some chimpanzees in to do tasks on a touch-screen computer. He waited some months before training Rollie as his first gorilla subject. At first, she merely had to touch the blank computer screen to get a reward. Later, she would be rewarded only after touching a floating numeral 1 about 2 inches high.
When the number 2 was added, she was not rewarded unless she touched the numbers in the right sequence. Rollie can now touch the numbers 1 to 7 in order. The most important use of the skill is language in which we learn the rules of syntax, what parts of speech come first, second and third.
The exercise Rollie works on is similar to one used elsewhere to test other animal species that display high intelligence, including pigeons, rhesus and capuchin monkeys, lemurs and chimps. Now a new study sheds light on why: Unlike chimps, humans undergo a massive explosion in white matter growth, or the connections between brain cells, in the first two years of life.
The new results, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, partly explain why humans are so much brainier than our nearest living relatives. But they also reveal why the first two years of life play such a key role in human development. Chimpanzees While past studies have shown that human brains go through a rapid expansion in connectivity, it wasn't clear that was unique among great apes a group that includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans.
To prove it was the signature of humanity's superior intelligence, researchers would need to prove it was different from that in our closest living relatives.
However, a U. But in Japan, those limitations didn't go into place until later, allowing the researchers to do live magnetic resonance imaging MRI brain scans of three baby chimps as they grew to 6 years of age.
They then compared the data with existing brain-imaging scans for six macaques and 28 Japanese children. If the relationship between brain and body weight is considered, the gorilla comes last in a comparison with the other apes and humans. Compared to chimpanzees, gorillas are calm, reserved and patient.
They are less adaptable and curious than chimpanzees and they don't show the same inclination to imitate. These two ape species have completely different characters - and that is why it is not easy to compare their intelligence.
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