414 Animal Memory and Cognition
Figure 14.6 The distribution of choices in the test phase of the Tolman
et al. (1946) experiment.
(^012)
4
8
12
RATS
16
20
1110987654321
PATHS
2% 2% 2%
9%
17%
36%
4% 4% 4%
6%
7 %^12 7 %^12
Figure 14.7 The figure shows that bees trained to go from the hive to Place
A when moved to a new location (Place B) go from B to A, rather than from
B to the hive to A.
A
B
150 m
160 m
Hive
specific place (H) then they would select a novel initial re-
sponse (go to the right) along paths 9 to 1. Of 56 rats that
were tested, 3 failed to respond on the test trials. Of the re-
maining 53 rats, 36% selected Path 5; the distribution of
choices for the remaining 34 rats is shown in Figure 14.6. If
choices from paths 9 to 1 are regarded as novel (right turn in-
stead of a left turn), then more than 87% of the rats selected a
novel route different from that learned in initial training.
This ability to use a novel route to a goal has been exam-
ined in bees (J. L. Gould, 1986). Bees are first trained to go
from the hive to Place A located to the west of the hive, as
shown in Figure 14.7. Following this training, bees are
caught and removed in an opaque box to a new spatial loca-
tion to the south, Place B. Place A is not visible from Place B
and the bees have never flown from B to A. What will the
bees do? Will they return to the hive and then go from the
hive to A? Or will they fly directly from B to A? Most bees fly
directly from Place B to Place A. This behavior, Gould sug-
gests, indicates that the bee is using a map-like representation
of its environment.
Since bees and rats can employ novel routes to reach a
goal, it is perhaps not surprising that the chimpanzee can do
the same. In an interesting experiment by Menzel (1973), a
chimpanzee was carried on the shoulders of one experi-
menter around a large area (4,000 m^2 ) while a second experi-
menter hid food in each of 18 randomly selected locations.
The chimpanzees, when released, were highly successful in
locating the hidden food, retrieving an average 13 of the 18
items. In so retrieving the hidden items, the animals neither
followed the routes along which they had been taken, nor re-
sponded haphazardly and at random. Rather, they followed
efficient routes that minimized the distance to the items.
Another indication that chimpanzees can form a map-like
representation of the environment comes from a study by
Menzel, Premack, and Woodruff (1978). In that study, chim-
panzees were shown an impoverished TV picture of where
food was hidden in a rather complicated area containing trees,
hills, and large objects. They were more successful in reach-
ing the goal than were control animals given no information.
Thus chimpanzees can match the information provided on a
flat TV screen to spatial locations in the three-dimensional
environment.
Language Learning in Animals
It is quite clear that animals communicate in the sense that cer-
tain behaviors in one animal are capable of producing specific
and predictable behaviors in another animal. Thus, as indi-
cated, a foraging bee’s dance when it returns to the hive indi-
cates to the bee’s conspecifics the location of food (Von Frisch,
1950, 1967). As another example, vervet monkeys can com-
municate to their conspecifics whether an observed predator is
a leopard, a snake, or an eagle (Seyfarth & Cheney, 1990). In the
case of the vervet, it is quite clear that some degree of learning
is involved. For example, young, inexperienced vervets may
mistakenly give the eagle call on spying a nondangerous bird.
Hockett (1960) identified 13 characteristics of human lan-
guage that can be presented in any system of communication.
These are shown in Table 14.1.