welcome to the primate cast hey everyone today we'll have an interview with Dr Heidi Lynn who's an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where she studies uh animal cognition uh in a very broad comparative way yeah and we were lucky enough to sit down with her uh in in early March when she came through Japan for a conference on the evolution of language that was held in Kyoto and uh she had known about the PRI and the research that's going on
here so she took the opportunity to come down and we're happy she did indeed so welcome to the podcast Heidi Lynn thank you very much thanks for having me so you um have a history of working with bonobos and I also saw from your CV that you also worked with marine mammals that's an interesting history yeah actually I started with marine mammals and then I had my actually I started as a linguist back in the day really uh and language was really very interesting to
me I also saw you at upen I also went to upen did you yeah at the same time or a different time uh I graduated in 2006 okay so way after me yes she still a young but I did take Linguistics there mark Lieberman is he there oh yeah yeah absolutely so yeah I um I started as a linguist and uh had heard about the Washo project with a sign language using chimpanzees and I thought that was the coolest thing ever but they pretty much shut it down and said oh but you know they found out that
it was really just her imitating and there's really nothing else we can learn about that and um my mother took me to Hawaii for my sister's graduation present it's a very long story we won't go into it but uh they sent me to Lou Herman's lab to visit after they found out what I was interested in and I said I have got to work here so I came back and worked with L Herman's lab for four years so can you tell us about that lab like what exactly does it involve it's
Lou Herman's lab was a with um four dolphins on the beach in Honolulu that literally you'd stand on the tower looking at the Dolphins and looking at Diamond Head and the beaches it was fantastic it was there was nothing better than that and uh he had trained his Dolphins to understand uh gestural and acoustic signals so that they could actually recombine different symbols that meant ball or hoop or fetch or uh jump over or swim under and he actually showed some understanding of word order
or symbol order in those Dolphins oh great so I came and I was watching them do that and I was like that is the coolest thing I've ever seen I have got to come here when I came there they gave a series of lectures and they talked about the work that Sue Savage Rumba was doing with kanzi and the bonobos and that just completely blew my mind because of course at pen they basically said well there's nothing interesting going on with animals and artificial communication but clearly there was a
ton still going on and the fact that Ki ponisha could understand English at the level of a 2 and a half-year-old child and that they could actually utilize their keyboards and you know really symbolic ways it was just amazing to me so I made my plan I was going to go to L Herman's lab for you know a number of years and I was going to go and I was going to work with S have a drumbo and that's what I did oh that's great so so now actually even PRI has been involved
in some projects but we hear a lot about this uh the parallels between for example citations and and primates and uh a lot of aspects of social behavior and also cognition but this is also going back a number of years so um yeah I did a um I did a paper recently actually looking not really specifically at these artificial language systems and in Dolphins what's been interesting about the language language like systems that they've created with dolphins is that they were all one way so there was
um Lou Herman's which was focused on comprehension so humans would make the signals and the Dolphins would have to follow them and then Diaries had created a keyboard system where the Dolphins could come and press the keys on the keyboards and a whistle would play and then they would get whatever it was that was associated with the key that pressed so they had production on one side and and comprehension on the other and then I took the language Research Center which had both comprehension and
production but I showed it all the parallels that we saw just in those artificial language systems so like acquisition of symbols which was really really fast for both of them afterward they started combining signals they would press the key a whistle would play and it was a whistle that they had hadn't heard in their um repertoire up to that point was this like a keyboard it was be in the water in the water underwater key underwater keyboard and then they would just push and it was a
mechanical press onon a bunch of buttons yeah are they big or how they were pretty big they're about about 4 in you know and they have like scrims on them they were just really simple symbols at that point there was just like a you know a ring or an X or something they didn't get very far um the but the do and the Dolphins were pretty young but they you know they only went for about 4 years I want to say that whole project was only four years long okay but um what started happening was that the
Dolphins would whistle the whistle as they approach the keyboard so they would whistle the ball whistle then they push the button and then they would whistle the ball whistle and then they started seeing that they were hear the ball Whistle While one of the Dolphins was playing with the ball in the pool and then what they started seeing was this ball and ring whistle combination where they had sort of mashed them together and the keyboard didn't allow that you
there was a half a second pause so even if you pushed a button and pushed a button really quick there was a break between them okay but they had actually sort of combined them completely into one whistle that's cool and that only showed up at a time when they started playing with both the ball and the ring in their mouth at the same time oh wow so there was some really amazing stuff going on one side or the other the combination stuff is amazing in um in Lou Herman's work uh and we saw a lot of
the same kind of stuff in the Apes and the Apes the ape work was actually more complex only because it's such a longer period of time that those Apes had been working and the fact that they have so many abilities that are same similar to humans so that we could actually see them a lot easier so I mean just the fact that they can understand English any English at all but they can understand pretty complex English sentences um is pretty amazing so the chimps and bonobos have been shown to
understand a lot of components of language like verbs like give me or play so how about the Dolphins can they they did yeah so what they had the Dolphins had um about 10 different objects and they had um six different actions I want to say and then they had different modifiers oh I see so they could actually do things like uh right hoop left ball fetch so they actually used two different syntaxes to Phoenix had an acoustic system okay I had a gestural system and they would um a K's system said
indirect object direct object action so what they would say if they said hoop ball fetch it meant take the ball to the hoop MH and so she would have to reorganize things in her brain a little bit that's interesting but they could do up to five yeah about up to five symbol sequences basically left hoop right ball Fetch and stuff like that W she could get it it's cool it was very cool actually here's the here's my favorite story they also created a question system where they had um two paddles one
was glossed as yes and one was glossed as no and they would put a bunch of um objects in the pool and they would ask her ball yes or ball question which means is there a ball in the pool and she would answer yes or no whether there was a ball in the pool so once they asked her to take a ball to a basket and the basket was not in the pool and they were like what'll she do and she went and she grabbed the ball and she took it to the no paddle like that is super cool
so they tested her again on that kind of stuff and she would do that she'd start combining things like they' tell her to jump over something that wasn't there and she'd jump over the no paddle and and stuff like that so very cool very inventive yes very creative creative that girl so by the time you went to the laboratory with kzi and pan banisha you already had some experience with yeah i' had already been there for almost four years actually okay that's great and what was your
focus when you were studying kzi and pimpan um for Kan and Pisha I did two I had a master's thesis which was on Fast mapping which was bringing in new objects and seeing how fast they could learn English words and they could uh coni in particular was very good at that task and he passed on his first test half the time so that's great really fast um my dissertation project was on vocabulary errors and what I was trying to look at was um the fact that when we would ask them that have their entire
keyboard in front of them and just to pass the time sometimes we would ask them to find things on their keyboards and the errors that they made were clearly non-random so we' ask them to find lemons and they would touch lemonade or something like that where we were like okay we can clearly see where they got that error from it wasn't they're just not randomly pointing to stuff so I actually went back and gathered all of their vocabulary test data for the for 10e period and put it
all together and started coding it and it became really intense because there was a lot of codes you could do was it auditorally similar in the English language were the lexigrams similar did they look similar were they functionally related but what we showed was that in contrast to this idea of um their understanding of their lexigrams being associative um you would expect them then to uh you would expect them to to confuse lexigrams with lexigrams that looked like each other more often
but actually what you found was that the majority of their errors were categorically related okay and they were also sort of hierarchically categorically related so you could see them making errors within objects but then within foods and then within certain kinds of foods like desserts were more likely to be you know confused with desserts fruits with fruits Etc like that and I saw you had a paper out recently about um it was it was cool it it com it Compares chimps one chimp and bonobos and ch
so and about declarative declarative yeah so um it's been a lot of talk about declarations and requests and the idea that these language using Apes only use it to request items or ask for something and that what's different is that humans use it mainly to share information that's not act about acquiring anything so what I went back again I have this I have actually an utterance database of uh over a 100,000 uses of the key Bo by all of the chimps wow and we combined it
with some diary work that had been done uh with young children in the one-word stage and so we took uh the kids data and we had the three Apes data and we started looking at declaratives and just pulling out the declaratives and looking at the types of declaratives now what we saw is that Apes do make a lot fewer declaratives than um the children do it's hard to tell exactly why that is though because apes are in captivity they have to ask for everything it's you know it's a bit
harder but they certainly make a lot of declaratives and they make the same kinds of declaratives as kids do there were only one or two examples of declarative types that we saw in kids and we didn't see in Apes can you give us some of those examples sure uh well the the most the most obvious one actually is that kids do a lot of showing they'll pick something up and they'll say you know plain and they just want you to look at it they don't want you to touch it they don't want you to
take it they don't want anything about it they just want to show it to you and we didn't see we only saw that once in in an ape where they actually were just showing something um and then attention getting like a a you know Mom they didn't do that either like if they wanted your attention they'd walk over and touch you so we didn't see the uses of the keyboard for that purpose but most of the other types we saw we saw um we including things like um talking about things that had happen
in the past or talking about plans that they were making in the future so they would be in a in a car going some place and they would they would on the keyboard they would say where they were going or um they'd pass a place where they had seen a squashed Turtle the day before and they say turtle at the keyboard stuff like that so um a lot of really interesting uses of declaratives and you know the upshot was that while there may be something to this idea that humans do
a lot more sharing than other species do obviously other species still do have that capability it is bi it it doesn't seem to be a biological difference between us and them but possibly an environmental one so to that regard then in in nature for example where would you see the use of these types of declaratives between individuals that's a good question right I mean why do the the the only time you would see anything that even remotely resembles a declarative is an alarm call and um
alarm calls can be there's a lot of discussion about how symbolic they really are how referential they really are and um you know there is an audience effect in most cases so for example verbet monkeys won't necessarily make an alarm call if there aren't other verbet mon monkeys around to hear them it actually is not to their advantage to do so um but how much do they understand about those alarm calls is a different question so um most of the time when you're in a more natural situation in
the woods and you're you're competing with other members of your own species there's not a huge amount of Cooper that goes on now the other time I can think of that that might be useful at least for chimpanzees to share information is when they're cooperatively hunting M so they're actually trying to get each other's attention to you know explain where to go or what to do I'm not sure that that happens but so I I have a question about um I'm fascinated by the
chimpanzee and the ape language projects I like to read all about them and I wonder if someone that's actually worked on one um it's it seems to me like there's a component of of the project which has to do with always being surprised by interesting things that the subjects are doing but they're not being G that that data is not being gathered in a systematic way so it just serves as anecdotes and then you have your separate research program and I wonder is it is it frustrating if you
see them do these amazing things but you know that you don't have a way of pro moving it because they only do it once like you said about the turtle on the side of the road it's so extraordinarily frustrating and to try and come up with part of the problem is when you try to create experiments around some of these anecdotes there's a fantastic anecdote actually one of my favorites of all time and uh kti and ponisha are in a Playard area and they have visitors so
they're interacting with these um new people who have come in and they are given juice and they don't normally get get juice at that point in time anyway and um Kani puts down his juice to interact with the visitor and turns his back and Pamona sort of Walks Behind him pours half of his juice into her cup and then puts his cup down and walks away Dr was like oh my God that is amazing like first the deception second of all to realize that he is going to like if you
take all of his juice he's clearly going to know that you only take half of his juice it and I kept trying to wre my brains to come up with a good way to test for that kind of deception but once you sort of artificially create those situations a lot of these Apes especially the language confident apes are looking for what trick is up your s and they're really just trying to figure out what the heck it I mean it's demand characteristics to the nth degree and they're just trying to figure out what
it is they're supposed to do yeah and so I have some similar things that have happened here for example when camera Crews come The Chimps do a lot better yeah at their tasks that's great because that there must be some kind of audience effect there they know they know what cameras are yeah and we have our video cameras which have the screen on them you can flip it around they can see that they're on it so they must have some idea of what a a camera is I don't know
I don't even know if it's that that's it though because a Ki at in Hawaii used to do like her jumps were twice as high and her she just did things all so with so much more energy when there's a camera crew around and I don't know if it was the camera itself or people the excitement was going on so all of these things would be interesting from an audience effect type of study perspective to study but if you brought in camera Crews like enough times to do a study then maybe they would be
habituated entirely possible it seems like a problem for these interesting anecdotes I did start actually I'm trying to do my my big problem has been declarative production so I'm really interested in this whole idea of can they obviously they can declaratively point as well as everything else and I try to do this experimentally because obviously because I have all the utterance data I can pull it out there but a lot of people don't feel like do feel like that's more anecdotal even
though it's a 100 thousand anecdotes um but we created this similar situation to what they do with kids and they we had you know things happening behind us that the chimpanzees or or the bonovas that in this case were actually supposed to then point to us and we got several good examples of them pointing these things out but again we were trying to do it too quickly so there were five or six things happening in one day and they just stopped pointing and they're just like oh yeah you guys are
being crazy again there's stuff going on behind you whatever or you know they were across the the very very large cage and they were pointing like here in front of their bodies and so you can't actually see that on video at all um so I have one example that is clear on video that I could actually show of a declarative point so what I actually thought was maybe what I need to do instead of you know going getting the data and then writing up the paper is look at this as
a much more longterm project so with you know limit me down to take me down to four bonobos and every time I go up I try to collect one trial on one of them you know and then in 10 years I'll have that's great but for that kind of stuff it might be that's sort of the way we have to start thinking it now and just can't cuz you just can't get enough of those interesting things happening at once or if you try and do it systematically in a short time then it loses it loses everything and the
spontaneity is all about that's the hard part it's studing spontaneous Behavior exactly um okay so can you tell us about your current research uh what am I doing currently I don't even remember anymore um actually I have a spatial memory project that I'm doing uh with uh more than just great apes my the here's what happened uh on the campus that I work they actually have bush babies and they don't have any other um primates so I went up and tried to run the primate
cognition test battery I had run this with um the inculturated Apes and the non- inculturated Apes and actually showed that the Apes with language training but also a lot more testing familiarity did much better than standard Zoo reared um Apes so now I was going to look at that and try and say oh well what do other not what do other primate species do went in sat down with the bush babies turned over two cups hit a grape under one of them and they were 50/50 picking where
the grape was even though they had just seen me put the grape under the cup so I was like all right well either they don't have object permanence at all or something else is going on so um I decided to systematically test that not just in bush babies but in a range of primate species and just actually look at where what do we see not just with two cup spatial memory but three cups and transposition and rotation and what kind of stuff do we find and a colleague
of mine at the same time had said well you know what I work with autistic kids and I don't think a lot of the autistic kids will actually be able to do this task part partially because as you move the testing platform forward there's a sort of sensory disruption and that might be something that actually is changing the way the autistic kids are perceiving it so right now we're running that we're running the autistic kids some neurotypical kids and a range of primate species so we did
get bush babies all the way up till 3 cup like most of them would pass the two cup eventually and but not to three cup and now we're running mango bees and several different species of macac some lemurs and the bonobos as well are you looking at things like side bias or oh yeah it's all counterbalanced it's all like we're going to take a look at everything really and and we're also looking at I mean some of the primate species are a lot more you know scent based than they are visually based bush
babies certainly who are nocturnal have a lot more difficulty with um visual tasks anyway so we're going to take a look at all of that we're that's probably going to be a relatively long-term project as well to get enough examples in each section of the sort of primate strata oh that's great can you put that into kind of a broader context then this research well yeah so the broader context for that is really looking I here's what it really is I think that in cognitive rese search
there's been this amazing focus on the great apes and the great apes are amazing and they're and they're fantastic and they're certainly much easier to work with than other species because they're so much more like us um but with my interest in Dolphins continuing and I do have several dolphin projects going on as well um this idea of looking more broadly comparatively to get a better idea of the environmental pressures that create some of these cognitive abilities ities or you know
it's entirely possible that they're actually just sort of physically important neurological rules or you know there's a lot of different reasons that we find analogous Evolution or even it might be that there's some sort of neural strata that is so basic that by the time you get to higher complex cognition it all looks the same and to try and look at that through primate species but other but non- primate species as well it's really interesting yeah so how
many primates are do you have an idea of how many you want to have in this project uh well I'd like to get as many as I possibly can my you know um Dwayne Rau did a task that was a very very simple task and his whole goal is to gather as many primates as he possibly could you end up with over 500 primates in like 18 different species so I don't think I'm going to go quite that far I would love to get I would love to get a couple hundred actually to get sort of
10 primate species or 20 primate species even with 10 in each one that would be amazing well you know for getting a lot of primate species inama is a good resource we have the highest density of primates in the world and diversity and diversity it's not just the PRI we also have the monkey part next door and they have a lot of primates there I think over 80 species here yeah that's amazing that would be great yeah be cool so then will you go and Link the ecologies of
all of these species to your I would have to I mean the whole idea is to to get enough so that we can actually do some of these more fine grain studies and look at well does color vision you know change does their diet change their ability does that you know all that sort of it makes more sense I think we were mentioning at lunch even that any sort of um fruit eating primates would spend would have more idea about spatial memory than any sort of insector species
so that would explain why bush babies aren't particularly good at it right not just and but also you know just regular Vision they're nocturnal they don't have color vision they they don't have really good Vision period yeah actually in the E ecological side of this this story I mean basically we're talking about the ability to form mental Maps or um spatial diffusion basically within the environments and on the ecological side there's a lot of modeling that goes into that and there's
a lot of things that are kind of known about at least theoretically the optimal ways animals are supposed to distribute themselves in their environment to search for food and things and the mental map being one of those um more often studied in primates I suppose but yeah but uh can you just give us a a the short version of how how then your your project scales up to that oh I don't know that it does no no I don't know I what I my intention would simply to be to to start listing off um you
know bi both biological and ecological variables that we know about each of the species the likelihood of me going deeply into ecology is not very high but I would say that I obviously would want to bring in ecological variables because I think they're clearly going to be really important sure especially if you're talking about homologues Evolution exactly well that's exactly right and the other option is if we get some good variables that we think are strongly
associated with this kind of spatial memory is to you know create a a computer model and run it and actually look at the from The evolutionary psychology perspective and are you just talking now about primates or are you also talking about species like can you do like canines or I would love to do other species the current plan is well Dolphins I definitely have on the in the plan um I would love to do lots of other species actually I have a proposal in at the Mobile Zoo to do some big cat work
oh wow and cuz they have seven tigers and I'm just there's just nothing out there about big cat cognition at any of any kind and the difficulty for us has actually been creating the apparatus that was going to allow us to work and to allow us to allow us to work safely but allow it to them to actually do what they need to do that's right right I I was going to ask you about that because now you have worked with a number of different species the Dolphins you've
got the Apes and things so logistically how has that been and then can you compare and contrasted oh from great apes to dolphins in general you know it actually is logistically great apes are by far the easiest species to work with like first of all they have hands they have thumbs they have the same kind of vision processing that we have um we've worked out in zoos and whatnot how to interact with them safely in many many ways and I mean just working with them
through chain link is super easy and all they have to do is touch something and and we can give it all primate species actually you know have that ability and your apparatus typically involve these shelves that kind of R back and forth It's like a tray table that is movable and you just push it forward and so you can manipulate things and then push it forward so then they have the choice and theide idea had been to create this appar similar kind of apparatus for
dolphins that would hook onto the side of the pools and then you could manipulate and then you could you there would be some sort of signal that you would unlock them and then they could but you don't want them to have to point so the idea is there's this you know question of whether they can declaratively indicate anything even primate species let alone big cats or you know Dolphins um so you want some way for them to manipulate the cups themselves and in this case we were
talking about actually um tying a string to a cup which would then tip over and for dolphins it's really easy it just tips over far enough that a fish slides into the pool okay for big cats it was becoming much more problematic about how to get it through their chain link to them and without having a lot of rotting spoiling meat somewhere to avoid yeah the zoo guests might not be too appreciative of that exactly yeah so one thing that we love here in Japan and at PRI is technology like
using touch panels and absolutely that kind of thing do you think that has any place in this type of um like especially with new species like the cats the cats so a friend of mine at Mobile Zoo actually has the Bears the um black bears are are touchscreen trained okay um and the problem is that the one bear who uses his paw is very destructive and it's so clumsy that to me it seems like it's just not the optimal use and so the rest of them are nose touchscreen users um which seems
more likely but with big cats they have the big flat nose so you don't really have as many options that's so are these Bears all kept in the same enclosure yeah yeah but she actually has separate so they have three rooms in the in a a shed basic basally so she can actually separate them out and they're trained to to separate out to come your tasks great it's really interesting though I was just thinking about this cultural transmission of behavior social learning
kind of thing so how do you get the one bear that's that's a paw Pusher and then these the rest of the Bears are all be amazing so is that no idea if they do any sort of imitative social is that is the Paw Pusher like a peripheral kind of individual that has no influence in the transmission of the behavior very good question I don't know we're all excited now here about the Microsoft Connect it's this camera that you put you attach to your computer and it can paint a 3D
image of you yes we could program for that they don't even need to touch the panel they just oriented and that's actually My Hope too eventually we were we were looking at a system it's not as cool as the connect system actually it's this is the connect system is the next step up but um hoping to put together another dolphin keyboard project that would then part of the problem with Dolphin keyboard projects is getting the information underwater but also having
some sort of interactive system where humans can use it at the same time as dolphins are using it and humans don't have to be humans in the water is just super clumsy and obviously Dolphins outside of the water are impossible so um to get some sort of interactive system going through a window or something like that and that was helpful the other thing that um actually I've been looking at a lot is the use of iPads with the um apes and particularly the keyboard um using
Apes where a lot of people go actually still go in with that but or or in fact to connect it to a wall and the idea for me with that was one of the limitations with the keyboard systems the computerized keyboard systems was that when you would when someone would come to the keyboard and enter in Keys you had no idea who that person was so they did a lot of like attempts to like oh you have to put in your name and then you have to and that just take again takes away the spontaneity and there's
no communicative system going on there at all so we had looked at actually with the new with the iPad tues came out with camera in them that it would actually just snap photos or even take small video clips just at periods of time whenever some whenever an individual would start using it again sure does it work out so well you have to kind of go back at the data and look at a bunch of pictures right that's right that's right who was using it at this moment that's right and then you
have to make sure that it's it's bright enough out that you can actually tell who it is especially with bovos if you have this big big black blob it just doesn't work as well as one would hope um what works the best actually is that group in in um France that has the yeah the chips they have the chips in there and uh I was talking about that eventually for at least for the Apes but I was hoping actually to create this iPad system that then be used again with autistic
children and with um apes and we could actually see language development stuff and compare the the kids and the Apes that's very far in the future for me but the kids could wear bracelets or you know have pins or whatever that would do the same kind of identification that's quite cool wow sounds like a lot of interesting stuff interesting stuff in the future let's hope I can get funding and access all right well this has been a great podcast I think we should wrap up
thanks for joining us and enjoy the rest of your time in Japan yeah we'll do all right thanks thanks