Chimpanzees; and human beings of various ages
Dr Daniel Povinelli and his team have been conducting research for some years at the University of Louisiana. They set out to prove that chimpanzees understand that other beings have simple perceptual experiences, such as seeing. This initial assumption was based upon the chimps’ habit of following someone’s gaze, as if they are trying to work out what that person is looking at.
After a long series of experiments the researchers were forced to conclude that what was happening was quite different from what they had supposed: when offered two people to whom they could gesture for food, one of them with a bucket over her head and the other one holding it beside her, the chimps chose either one at random.
Other similar experiments produced the same results. The chimps learnt by simple trial and error which researcher had the food.
Dr Povinelli’s conclusions deal with the time, some five million years ago, when the evolutionary pathways of the early human and the chimpanzee separated. Whilst the actual behaviours of the two species are remarkably similar in a number of ways - we share 98.8 per cent of our genome with chimpanzees, after all - the key feature to emerge in the human mind was the ability to understand and interpret the behaviours of other creatures.
A classic “higher level function”, in Povinelli’s view.
He goes on to describe human minds as a mosaic of ancient low and intermediate-level cognitive mechanisms, interspersed with higher-level mechanisms, but points out that we cannot normally tell when our actions stem from the earlier, lower-level mechanisms. This being the case, we tend, when asked, to give high-level explanations for all our behaviours.
This is probably the main drawback of being possessed with “higher-level cognitive functioning”: it provides us with a fine-tuning perspective through which we see much of the rest of the animal world, leading us to presume that there are human-like impulses behind any behaviours that superficially resemble our own.
The same mechanism also draws our attention to the wealth of detail to be found at the surface of things. Whilst these details furnish our “higher-level functioning” with plenty of baubles with which to entertain itself, they tend to distract our attention from what might lie beneath the glittery facade.
The positive side of this adaptive trait is that we readily notice obvious features of our environment, of great assistance in foraging for food and identifying relatively benign refuges in a hostile landscape. The downside is that we are pretty hopeless when, as adults, we try to look at the world through the prism of a baby's early understanding. The newborn baby is informed by the sensory receptor patterns from its limb and trunk movements and is beginning to make sense of the stimuli (photons, soundwaves, activated smell, taste and pressure receptors) from its contingent senses.
Without appreciation of this state of affairs we cannot 'de-centre' sufficiently to do other than read our own grown-up understanding, conditioned by decades of narrow, particularised experience, into the micromovements of the neonate's face.
'Look, he's smiling to tell us he approves. Oh, he's frowning and turning away with a small cry, he doesn't like what I've just done/said/ asked of him.'
No he's not. He's a baby. Give him a chance. Leave him to develop. Reflect seriously on what his system needs to do to turn this young baby into an organism, a unified, autonomous self.
In this way you will go against Nature, according to Dr Geoffrey Waldon, because it [Nature] has arranged things in such a way that we fail to notice the features that are essential to foundational learning and development - so that we cannot interfere and mess things up - and instead find that our attention falls upon the standard milestones - "obviously unimportant moments in the life of the child" - classically, the first 'word', the first step, the first evidence of ability to 'read' text. And now, apparently, the first story that the phenomenal baby tells to its mother, giving her the opportunity to learn from the condensed wisdom and life-experience of a two-week old baby. Progress in our understanding of child development, or what?
What?
Terry
