Koko the Gorilla: Great Ape or Monkey Business?

[amadeus]

Wikipedia article on Koko

What’s your take? Could Koko really communicate in sign language, or was this a result of conditioning by her handlers?

I just really like the title, to be honest.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Of course she could communicate like a child. To think otherwise is ridiculous.

 

[H4run]

Dang not only she got a cool name, she's also way older than me, and she scored an IQ of 90? That's an average IQ of most human. (Binet score also depend on the age, I wonder which human age category the tester used to measure her IQ, and why is that)

The answer of your question both of the scenario is truth (I don't really have any ideas in how complex she could communicate though, my conclusion is still pure abstraction), she learned sign language through a conditioning (enforcement on learning) process. I don't see why both premises cannot be equally truth.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Wikipedia article on Koko

What’s your take? Could Koko really communicate in sign language, or was this a result of conditioning by her handlers?

I just really like the title, to be honest.

She really communicated.

Have a look at this:

When Robin Williams died, Koko grieved for him.


Please don't refer to her as a monkey. She was a gorilla, which is a completely different level of primate.

 

[amadeus]

It’s a play on words. Monkeys and gorillas aren’t the same, but there’s not a lot to work with limiting myself exclusively to one type of primate. If I did, I’d go bananas.

In my haste to post the thread this morning it looks like the phrasing of my question was poor enough for me to try and elaborate or at least make it less bad: by communication, I mean was Koko saying things that Koko “thought” herself, or was this due to the interpretations done by her handlers? Of course they wanted Koko to speak, so when she did make some communicative effort the handlers wanted to interpret it as meaning something that they understood.

I watched a couple videos, including the Robin Williams one above. I’m still not sure that what Koko is doing is what we could call language.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It’s a play on words. Monkeys and gorillas aren’t the same, but there’s not a lot to work with limiting myself exclusively to one type of primate. If I did, I’d go bananas.

In my haste to post the thread this morning it looks like the phrasing of my question was poor enough for me to try and elaborate or at least make it less bad: by communication, I mean was Koko saying things that Koko “thought” herself, or was this due to the interpretations done by her handlers? Of course they wanted Koko to speak, so when she did make some communicative effort the handlers wanted to interpret it as meaning something that they understood.

I watched a couple videos, including the Robin Williams one above. I’m still not sure that what Koko is doing is what we could call language.

She communicated things to her handlers from her point of view. Even when my cat informs me that she's hungry, she's doing it in the language of the domestic house cat.

Just because we don't fully understand it yet, that doesn't mean that more complex mammals don't have language. It's not spoken words like we have, because their anatomy lacks the means to produce words as we do. I've mentioned this more than once in the cat/kitten thread that cats' language is physical as well as vocal. I cannot communicate with my cat in her own language because I lack her anatomy. I can't tilt and swivel my ears, I don't have whiskers, I don't have a tail, and try as I have, I just can't manage much of a meow, growl, or purr. Whatever I do manage would come out with a very heavy "human accent."

Don't think Koko's teachers weren't meticulous in this. Koko invented her own combinations of signs to communicate emotions and wants and don't-wants that she felt necessary to share.

BTW, it's extremely human-centric and biased to claim that it's up to us to decide if animals have language. They communicate with each other in ways meaningful to them. That is their language.

 

[H4run]

I think cat mostly miaw-ing to human. The sound that they produce also can be varied in accordance to (the) human recipient, they observing and adjusting until the reaction is click to what they want. I watch or read it somewhere I'm not sure.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I think cat mostly miaw-ing to human. The sound that they produce also can be varied in accordance to (the) human recipient, they observing and adjusting until the reaction is click to what they want. I watch or read it somewhere I'm not sure.

Cats and dogs are able to train humans, using stimulus-response-reward, albeit with a different goal in mind than humans have. Maddy keeps trying with me. She has yet to understand that tipping the garbage can over and making a mess is not likely to make me want to feed her. It does make me angry. So neither of us gets the reward.

 

[Birdjaguar]

But it does get your attention.