Primate Primer

By Jo McCulty Professor of Psychology Sally Boysen pals around with Keeli, one of two chimpanzee subjects featured in the April 14 Discovery Channel program "Keeli and Ivy: Chimps Like Us." Boysen and her staff at Ohio State's Chimpanzee Center in northwest Columbus have taught the chimps to recognize sequential patterns of letters and read short words. A Discovery Channel crew followed the research over four years before airing the recent program. The Discovery Channel created a companion Web site at http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/chimps/chimps.html. The program is scheduled to air again at noon on April 28.

Discovery Channel watches OSU chimps learn to read

After a little more than three years' effort, psychologists at Ohio State have taught a pair of young chimpanzees to "read" the names of nearly a dozen objects, to recognize the animals' own printed names and the names of tools they need to acquire their favorite foods.

In three more years, they hope to teach the animals to communicate in simple sentences.

That may seem a modest accomplishment -- giving a chimp a dozen-word vocabulary. But it is really a major step forward in a 20-year study of how these great apes learn, communicate and handle information. And at the end of this process, these animals may be able to use it to tell us -- in their own words -- about chimpanzee culture and society.

Sally Boysen, a professor of psychology at Ohio State, has spent more than two decades investigating how a colony of chimps at the University learn and communicate. Her latest work was the subject of an hour-long documentary, "Keeli & Ivy: Chimps Like Us," which aired April 14 on the Discovery Channel.

Aside from Boysen and her staff, the real stars of this program are two 6-year-old primates whose arrival at the OSU Chimpanzee Center gave researchers the chance to test this species' ability to process information sequentially. Humans excel at this ability and that, ostensibly, may set us apart from other animals.

It hasn't been clear, however, if this talent might possibly be established in chimps to teach them simple reading skills. While Boysen's work with nine other chimps over the years made great strides, part of the process of acculturating the animals to the research tasks has made testing this hypothesis difficult. With Keeli and Ivy, however, Boysen had a clean slate to work with.

"We knew from our earlier work in teaching the animals numbers and how to count that they had some ability to process information sequentially," Boysen said. "I wanted to look at a different symbolic representational system that would force the animals to construct abstract symbols in a sequence.

"I decided that teaching them English -- using reading, writing and constructing words based on alphabetic characters -- would work nicely. It seemed to me that if we had chimps that were young enough, that they could learn to build that kind of system."

Years before, one of Boysen's other chimps, Bobby, had shown an uncanny ability to learn number sequences and even to fill in missing numbers in a sequence. The next step was to shift from numbers to letters, and 2-year-old Keeli and Ivy were at a perfect age to try.

"The idea was to start them with a sequential task while they were little so that they could 'build' a template that used the alphabet. We started with 'A,' then 'AB,' then 'ABC,' 'ABCD' and 'ABCDE' to give them the idea that the letters had an order to them," Boysen explained.

After the animals seemed to understand that, the researchers added simple three-letter words -- "POP" (the chimps love orange soda), "KEY" (the cabinet in which the soda is stored in the lab is locked with a key), and "CAT" (both chimps adored the housecats roaming the center, though while Keeli was affectionate and gentle, Ivy enjoyed teasing the animals).

But "building" even those simple words proved a slow and arduous task, so Boysen shifted to "whole word recognition," temporarily abandoning the challenge of the chimps spelling out the words.

"It really helped to switch to using the whole words," the researcher said.

"The chimps started learning things much more rapidly. We quickly introduced pictures of Keeli and Ivy and images of several of their other chimpanzee companions and their English names. Now we've added the names of certain tools -- a stick and a sponge -- that are functional in the animals' daily lives." In the wild, chimpanzees use sticks to fish for termites that are out of reach, deep in dirt mounds. They also use wads of leaves to soak up water to drink. The sponge serves the OSU chimps as a surrogate for the leaves.

Boysen's team is teaching the two primates to use their limited vocabulary in different ways, such as making a request.

"Right now, they are using them (the words) functionally," she said. "They have to ask for a stick to reach pudding that is out of their reach, or for the sponge to soak up orange soda from a tube."

The pivotal question for the future, however, is whether the two young chimps can learn syntax -- can they put the words together in novel combinations, as human children learn to do.

"We're being very careful to make sure that we don't impose any syntax or grammar on the animals as they learn to recognize English words," Boysen said. "We want to see if any patterns or regularities emerge in the animals' rudimentary language that can tell us things about how they see themselves and their environment.

"I think we can use this approach to study the so-called 'theory of mind' issues -- how one chimpanzee perceives the state of mind of another," she said. Earlier work with her other chimps showed Boysen that the animals are able to detect whether another primate is aware of a possible, specific threat or reward.

The young age of Keeli and Ivy was key to the success so far with this project, which raises the question of whether there is a window in time, a sensitive period, when primates like these might be able to learn in this way.

"It's important that chimps have some types of learning experiences early in their lives, between birth and the age of 3 or 4 years old, just as these are the most important years for critical learning in human children," Boysen explained.

"But chimps won't be able to express their ideas or thoughts in as sophisticated a manner as children will eventually be able to do. That means that our challenge will be to be as creative as possible in trying to measure their true abilities.

"The only real limiting factor will probably be our own limitations in devising new ways to do just that," she said.

Touch of evil

By Jo McCulty Rick Lingston, center, leads class discussion on "What is evil?"

Humanities course explores 'big idea'

They met over plastic trays and plates of food in a basement dining hall chilled by over-zealous air conditioning. They talked of Locke and Auden, Hitler and bin Laden. They talked of peace and war, intent and consequences, the individual and the collective.

On the evening of April 17, 11 undergraduate students met in North Commons for two hours of conversation on the topic of "What is evil?" The students, participants in a one-credit course organized by the OSU Humanities Institute, will have five Wednesday night dinner meetings throughout the quarter where they will grapple with the concept of evil. The discussions are led by course facilitator Rick Livingston and a number of guest speakers.

Livingston, associate director of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, said the course was created to provide students with a chance to explore big ideas. Since the topic is bigger than any one academic discipline, the seminar is being offered through the College of Humanities itself, Livingston said.

Given the events of Sept. 11, evil seemed like the most obvious choice for the course's first installment.

"It is a concept that is constantly being presented in the news right now, right down to the president articulating it regularly in speeches. We thought there ought to be a place for students to have a serious discussion about what it means," Livingston said.

The class was announced in January, and within a day, the Humanities Institute had received 50 student inquiries. The class roster of 18 includes engineering, history, chemistry and philosophy majors.

Chris Riley, a freshman majoring in integrated social studies, thought the class would be a good way to follow up a philosophy class he recently took.

"I had a philosophy class last quarter and the topic came up a little bit, but we didn't really explore it in-depth," Riley said. "I like food and I like thinking and it seemed like the thing to do. It's two hours I wouldn't be using otherwise."

The casual atmosphere was intentional, Livingston said. "People always imagine you go to college and have intellectual discussion over dinner. This is a way to formalize that discussion and bring in faculty and experts to guide the conversation," he said.

The guest list includes a faculty member from the Pontifical College Josephinum, a judge, and an associate professor in the School of Teaching and Learning, Brian Edmiston, who was the guest on April 17.

Edmiston navigated the students through a conversation which began with a discussion of a Florida mayor's recent proclamation banning Satan from her town and twisted on through Nazi Germany, Salem, Mass., and Afghanistan. The students expressed opinions about the United States' treatment of Native Americans, the Nuremberg Trials, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the current conflict between Palestine and Israel, and the U.S. military's involvement in Afghanistan.

Hesitant at first, the students soon warmed to Edmiston's question-and-answer style of teaching, and conversation began flowing. They squirmed as he took on the role of a Nazi officer but they willingly squared off with him to justify their judgments on his persona's wartime actions. When he challenged their answers, they sometimes floundered, and sometimes triumphed.

Edmiston urged the students to answer questions not just intellectually, but to think about how they would actually respond to moral dilemmas in their own lives.

Getting the students to consider whether evil is a tangible concept is part of the course's mission, Livingston said.

"That's a real questions for students. Is calling something evil merely a rhetorical gesture, or is it a serious judgment, meaningful for real life?"

Edmiston and Livingston offered no answers.

"It's not something we're lecturing to them about. It's an occasion to probe each other's thinking and get insight into how we make judgments and incorporate moral concepts into everyday living," Livingston said. "That's part of our mandate as an institute, to develop these ways in which people can be more flexible in their teaching and contact with students. It gives faculty an outlet as well as students."

Future "Big Ideas" courses are in the planning stages. Evil will be discussed again in the fall, with subsequent courses perhaps taking on issues such as justice, the future, work or freedom, Livingston said.

History class offers insight into Afghanistan's past

This quarter, Stephen Dale has found himself being a new professor of an ancient topic. In response to the events of Sept. 11, Dale is teaching a course on the history of Afghanistan.

The class isn't a dissection of today's headlines, however.

"I told students on the first day: 'This is not a current events course,'"Dale said.

As a professor of history, Dale approaches the subject with a longer view Ñ stretching back to Afghanistan's turbulent past centuries ago, when control of the region was passed back and forth between empires to the east and north.

That isn't to say students won't be exposed to Afghanistan topics being commonly discussed in the news, but they'll be able to place those subjects within a historical context.

Stephen Dale       By Kevin Fitzsimons

"The first two weeks we spent talking about geography and ethnic groups and languages. A large component of the course is just trying to understand those aspects of the culture,"Dale said.

He considers the focal point of the class to be on the history of Afghanistan since 1747. "1747 is the date most people identify as a time that government was established in Afghanistan by Afghans,"Dale said. "The period before then was always in control of empires in Iran and East Asia. When those empires weakened in the 18th century, it provided a chance for Afghans to fill a power vacuum."

The course will eventually cover material students may be more familiar with, such as the Soviet invasion in the 1970s or the Taliban's recent control of the country.

Leila Rupp, chair of the Department of History, encouraged Dale to create the class.

"Stephen Dale is the perfect person to teach such a course, and he was willing to develop one on short notice,"she said. "We don't often develop courses in response to current events, but this just seemed so important, and the lack of knowledge about the history of Afghanistan seemed so widespread, that I thought it would be good for the University and the community."

Dale is a specialist in Islamic history, and has conducted work on India, Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia. Pulling the material together for the class lectures has been a challenge, but he said it's been a good experience. "It's synthesizing things I've never had the chance to do before."

To augment his own knowledge, Dale has invited several guest lecturers to participate in the class: John Greisberger, assistant vice president for student affairs in international education, spoke to the class about his experiences as a Peace Corps member in Afghanistan during the 1970s; Afghanistan native Alam Payind, director of Ohio State's Middle East Studies Center, will speak from a scholarly and personal perspective; Margaret Mills, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, will speak on women in Afghanistan, based on her experiences visiting western Afghanistan;

and Farah Shadchehr, a graduate assistant for the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, will teach the students how to do basic Arabic script.

Finding books to use as texts was more of a challenge. "Texts are a real problem,"Dale said. "Even though there is all this attention focused on Afghanistan, there is not all that much available. Some things that had been in print are now out of print."

He's using Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, published in 2002, and An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, first published in 1815, which Dale had to order from India. He is also using Taliban, published in 2000, and Heroes of the Age, a 1996 historical and anthropological study of Afghanistan.

The class has about 30 undergraduate students enrolled. Their reasons for taking the class vary, Dale said. Some of the students are from the Middle East or are American Muslims, others are history majors with an interest in military affairs, and others were drawn to the course because of the topic's relation to current events. Afghanistan hasn't been a popular topic for Americans to study, Dale concedes. "Americans have traditionally not taken that much interest in smaller countries like Afghanistan,"he said.

Now that the United States is involved politically with Afghanistan, Dale hopes the U.S. government will stick around and help the country transition into a stable nation.

Acquainting students with knowledge of the country, and its people, is a step forward, Dale said.

"Hopefully, students in this class will derive a greater sympathy for what the Afghan people have gone through,"he said. "A subject like this can initially seem foreign and exotic because it is so far removed from the students' experience. What we're trying to do is make it real for them."