Monkeys Are As Smart As College Students Because They Have Better Teachers

You can always tell when scientific meetings such as the AAAS meeting are going on because there are a lot of news stories about, well science.

One of the most recent, again from the National Geographic News, bore the title, "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds."

This story, just as others like it, begs for skeptical thinking.

In the story, we are told that "Rhesus macaques placed in front of touch screens in a Duke University laboratory were able to subtract dots—not by counting them individually but by using a more instantaneous ability researchers call number sense."

The lead researcher, Duke University graduate student Jessica Cantlon, was quoted as saying that the results "suggest that these abilities are part of a primitive system for reasoning about numbers that has been passed down for millions of years of evolutionary time."

An "instantaneous ability" to subtract? A "number sense"? Like the sense of smell, taste, vision? A primitive system for reasoning?

Malarkey!

These ways of talking about the monkeys' behavior are completely circular: What is the evidence for the "number sense," or the "primitive system"? Only the monkeys' behavior. There is no independent evidence for any of these claims.

Not to take anything away from the monkeys, but what is left out of the sloppy and designed-for-PR ways of describing what the monkeys did was a throw-away line in the story about what happened after the monkey made a correct response: "Each correct answer was worth a serving of Kool-Aid." No mention was made of what happened if the monkeys made an incorrect response which they surely did at the beginning of training.

Some will recognize this as operant learning: correct responses produce consequences called "reinforcers," and incorrect responses likely produce either a brief time-out, when the monkey loses the opportunity to respond, or some other withholding of reinforcement (i.e., the Kool-Aid).

Why is it important to describe the training? Simple. Because without the training, the monkeys do not subtract. Why is this point important? Because only if monkeys engage in the kinds of behaviors WITHOUT training can they be said the have a "number sense," or a "primitive system for reasoning."

It is not the monkeys who have done anything worth writing about; it is the training! Thus, monkeys do not have a number sense or ability to "add" or "subtract." What they have, which is what we have, is the ability to learn.

But in the absence of a good learning environment, neither monkeys nor people, will learn. So, the fact that the college students used as controls in the study performed as well as the monkeys' means only that the monkeys had better teachers than the supposedly smarter college students.