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William M. Fields, director of bonobo research, had three publications in 2007 and led the program through a busy research schedule focusing on the cultural and cognitive processes of bonobos. Great Ape Trust photo. |
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Des Moines, Iowa – February 27, 2008 – Great Ape Trust of Iowa’s bonobo research team ended 2007 in a flurry of activities that included publications, presentations, exhibits, filming and media interviews on top of The Trust’s continued scientific inquiry into the cultural and cognitive processes of bonobos, questions of human uniqueness and others related to the origins and future of language, culture, tools and intelligence.
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Bonobo research program head William M. Fields reared Nyota, pictured above using the lexigram board to communicate, in a bicultural environment. Great Ape Trust photo. |
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William M. Fields, one of only two scientists in the world to conduct language research with bonobos, was named Great Ape Trust’s director of bonobo research last spring. Fields has collaborated with bonobos Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota since 1997. These three language-competent bonobos are part of a larger colony who moved to Great Ape Trust in 2005 from Georgia State University’s Language Research Center, where Fields’ mentors and colleagues Dr. Duane Rumbaugh and Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh began groundbreaking research that challenged long-held scientific beliefs about language competency among great apes. Rumbaugh is now a scientist emeritus at Great Ape Trust and Savage-Rumbaugh is a scientist with special standing.
Bonobo research programs in 2007 reflected the over-arching hypothesis that the environment had a stronger effect than genes in Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyoto’s acquisition of language and in other cognitive processes, a theory advanced by Fields and colleagues Savage-Rumbuagh and Dr. Pär Segerdahl in Kanzi’s Primal Language. That was a departure from traditionally held beliefs that ape cognition and human cognition are different, as ape cognition is inherently limited regardless of the ape’s cultural rearing. That assumption led scientists to conclude that tests of different apes, regardless of whether they were raised in the wild or in captivity, should produce similar results.
Fields and his colleagues said that exposing the bonobos to human culture in a Pan/Homo environment – that is, in a bicultural world with bonobos (Pan paniscus) and humans (Homo sapiens) – created a cultural web that changed the apes’ cognition. Most profound in this new area of scientific inquiry was Kanzi’s spontaneous acquisition of language. He had not been actively taught to use the lexigram to communicate, but acquired the knowledge as scientists tried to teach language to his mother, Matata.
“Language is acquired, not taught,” Fields said. “While the ability to learn vocabulary through the lexigram throughout life exists, the ability to use words in a language-like way is acquired through phased-based acquisitions in the post-natal ontogeny.
“The only organisms on this planet capable of acquiring language are babies,” he said.
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Neuroanatomical studies, including neural imaging techniques combined with behavioral data; |
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Cultural and linguistic studies including those quantifying bonobos’ receptive competence for spoken English, stone tool use and manufacture, music production, and the linguistic categorical analysis of bonobo language as defined in Kanzi’s Primal Language; and |
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Perception and learning studies based on experimental, developmental and comparative psychology. |
| In addition to overseeing the daily operations of the bonobo laboratory and staff, coordinating research activities with leading scientists throughout the world, and assisting with the development of educational opportunities with The Trust’s academic partners, Fields had three major publications in 2007: |
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Ethnographic Kanzi Versus Empirical Kanzi: On the Distinction Between Home and Laboratory in the Lives of Encultured Apes, published in the Italian journal Rivista di Analisi del Testo. The analysis in the publication shows that Kanzi’s receptive competence for spoken English arises from a variety of sources other than just his experiences with lexigrams. “Obviously, Kanzi’s ability to understand English arises from some other place than just lexigrams,” said Fields, who also presented his research at the 119th annual meeting of the Iowa Academy of Science held in Pella in April 2007. |
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The Material Practices of Ape Language, co-authored with Segerdahl and Savage-Rumbaugh. In a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Socio-Cultural Psychology published by Cambridge University Press and edited by J. Valsiner and Alberta Rosa, Fields and his co-authors share key findings from a longitudinal study of a society of bonobos with language, culture and tools. |
| The handbook reflects the growth of a new academic discipline – cultural psychology – that has built new connections between psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and semiotics, and it integrates contributions of sociocultural specialists from 15 countries, all tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations and the environment. |
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Rules and Tools: Beyond Anthropomorphism, a chapter in The Oldowan: Case Studies Into the Earliest Stone Age, the first volume in a monograph series published by the Stone Age Institute Press, and edited by the Stone Age Institute co-directors Dr. Nicholas Toth and Dr. Kathy Schick. Their tome traces the emergence of tool-making technology on the African continent more than 2.5 million years ago and a resulting major evolutionary shift in the human lineage. The volume shows a range of probing, multi-disciplinary experimental investigations, including the work of Fields and his co-author Savage-Rumbaugh, who offered a qualitative report on the use of stone tools. |
Fields also worked closely with the American Museum of Natural History on a 25-year permanent interactive exhibit in the museum’s Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. Video taken of Kanzi using the lexigram keyboard to communicate is featured in a section of the exhibit titled “What Makes Us Human?” and exploring, among other topics, the origins of language. The acquisition of language was previously viewed as a human characteristic, but Kanzi’s work at the keyboard suggests a small biological gap between human and non-human primates.
Throughout the year, the bonobo research program at Great Ape Trust received significant international media attention. Fields offered insight in on-camera interviews with the History Channel, National Geographic TV, ABC News and Nightline, Discovery Channel, New Scientist and Swedish Educational Television, as well as local newspaper, television and radio media outlets. He also assisted NHK Television, Japan’s government-owned network, in filming for a science video documentary.
Great Ape Trust Background
Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility in southeast Des Moines dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence. When completed, Great Ape Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.
Great Ape Trust is dedicated to providing sanctuary and an honorable life for great apes, studying the intelligence of great apes, advancing conservation of great apes and providing unique educational experiences about great apes. Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization and is certified by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). |
Great Ape Trust is certified by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums
