LRC History - **UPDATE COMING SOON!**

LRC Director Emeritus Duane M. Rumbaugh is a comparative psychologist whose research into the nature of the learning and language processes of primates, in relation to their brain evolution and development, dates back to 1958 when he conducted research with the great apes at the San Diego Zoo and with monkeys at San Diego State College. He served as chairman of the Psychology Department and as Regents' Professor of Psychology and Biology at Georgia State University from 1971 until his retirement in 2000. From 1969 to 1971 he served as Associate Director and Chief of Behavior at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center of Emory University.

In 1971, Rumbaugh initiated the Lana Chimpanzee Language Project and led the development of a computer-monitored keyboard for that and other projects which have followed to this day at the LRC. Similar keyboards are used by researchers in Japan and also at Disney World. Some of the projects have included children and young adults whose language development was compromised by mental retardation. In 1981 he helped found the university's Language Research Center and served as its director until the summer of 2001.

Rumbaugh received his master's degree from Kent State University in 1951 and his Ph.D. in general-experimental psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1955. He has had continuous grant support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development since 1971 to the present. Other agencies to support his research have been NSF and NASA.
In addition to the computer-monitored keyboard, Rumbaugh led the development of automated training and testing equipment for rhesus macaques. That equipment, called the Language Research Center's Computerized Test System, entails use of a joystick by the primates in complex interactive tasks with a computer. It is widely used in behavioral research programs across this nation as well as in Europe and Russia.

Rumbaugh was educated as a general-experimental psychologist and remains one in orientation and commitment. He believes that general psychology is the most important area for the education of students, both undergraduate and graduate. The experimental method is a basic tool in the building of knowledge and its power and limitations should be clearly articulated to students and, in due course, mastered by them along with other research tools of our field.

He believes that the basic matrix of psychology is one of general-comparative psychology. Our subject material is by definition behavior at all levels of life and function. Students should appreciate the importance of behavior in animals of various species and ages in understanding our own behavior. Brain complexity varies with species and with development. The reliance upon unlearned or instinctive behavior is supplanted in measure by learning as the brain and nervous system becomes increasingly complex. Yet, the importance of unlearned bases of behaviors remains even in our own species. We must understand them in the light of their interaction with learning processes if we are to negotiate the complexities of the emerging world that is challenged with excessive population and demands for natural resources. Violence at all levels is to be understood best from a comparative perspective, as is peace making and healthful social behavior.

From our original LANA project which began in 1971 came the development of a lexigram keyboard that enabled a chimpanzee to develop novel sentences and requests. The LANA project aimed not to document the learning ability in Pan troglodytes but instead to advance research and develop a computer-controlled language training system for use with those with whom language learning ability was limited, i.e. apes or children with mental retardation. As the LANA project progressed, it became clear that such a keyboard was incredibly instrumental for teaching apes to successfully learn and develop language skills. It also proved that Lana herself was adept at learning and using dozens of lexigrams.

Further questions on the nature of language were raised by LRC researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues working with chimpanzees Sherman and Austin in the late 1970s. Unlike Lana, Sherman and Austin were shown to understand semantics, or word meaning. While Lana's training emphasized language production, Sherman and Austin learned the lexigrams and corresponding names of three kinds of food and three tools; the emphasis was on their learning how to classify them. In controlled tests, Sherman and Austin were presented with 17 new lexigrams and asked to categorize them as food or tools based on their knowledge of the previous six, which they did successfully and with only one error; Sherman called a sponge a food. (But Sherman often sucked on sponges when they were soaked with juice, so technically he might have known what he was talking about.)

For Sherman and Austin, comprehension was the key, not a byproduct. They had learned to classify objects by type and reach for them in separate bins, which necessitated their understanding key things about each object. Later these two apes demonstrated symbol-based, cross-modal matching; they could look at a lexigram and then reach into a box to retrieve it without seeing it first. In a subsequent study, Sherman and Austin were shown a room containing a random array of food and drinks and asked to choose one silently, then leave the room. While in the second room, they declared via lexigram the name of the item that they intended to get when they went back to visit the first room. If they chose the declared item upon their reentry into the first room, they were given that food or drink as a reward. Both Sherman and Austin completed this test with 90 percent accuracy, documenting their ability to use lexigrams to declare intent.

A new era in LRC research began the day Matata, a bonobo brought to the center after six years of life in the wild, was separated from her son Kanzi in 1982 and taken to another location so she could mate. Teaching Matata language had largely been a failure. After years of training, she could use only a few symbols and showed no sign that they were meaningful to her. But on the day she left, the 2 ½ year-old Kanzi stepped up to the plate. With Matata gone, Kanzi needed to communicate his needs to the human researchers - and he did, picking up the lexigram keyboard and using it with ease from the very day his mother left their enclosure. Kanzi, though he had never been taught, had picked up language by watching while we tried to teach Matata.

The result was a major shift in approach to language with apes at the center; Savage-Rumbaugh reworked her research protocol to abandon "language training." Instead, because Kanzi had learned so well by simply listening to and participating in the environment at the lab, he was henceforth included as an understanding individual in a human-bonobo culture. Much as parents do with their infant children, people spoke to Kanzi as though he understood what they were saying. New lexigrams were developed to keep pace with Kanzi's rapidly expanding vocabulary, and electronic versions of the keyboard sounded out the English equivalents as he pressed the keys. From that first day forward, he constantly used his keyboard to carry on conversations with the humans in his environment with nary a day of formal training.

Kanzi soon became adept at using the keyboard to ask for food in its various locations (i.e. in the refrigerator, in the backpack), to play games and to visit certain places in the 55-acre forest surrounding the lab. He learned to ask to visit other apes at the lab by pressing the lexigram on his keyboard representing their names. He learned to cook and to ask for videotapes to watch. By the time Kanzi was 5 and a half years old, he had learned 149 lexigrams and demonstrated comprehension of not just single words but novel sentences. Kanzi proved much more successful at comprehending human speech than Sherman or Austin, who learned lexigrams mostly by sight, and did remarkably well when tested at this.

Was Kanzi's success at language unique to the bonobo, or could it in fact be replicated in a chimpanzee in the same language-rich environment? This question was undertaken by Savage-Rumbaugh, Brakke & Hutchins with the infant apes Panzee (P. troglodytes) and Panbanisha (P. paniscus) beginning shortly after their birth in 1985. By the time they were two years old, it was clear that Panbanisha had a much greater capacity for language and use of the keyboard than did Panzee, though again immersion in a bicultural, language-dominated atmosphere led to a remarkable command of language in both apes.

Further work by Savage-Rumbaugh with Kanzi attempted to contrast his sentence comprehension with a human child, Alia. Alia's mother worked with her at the keyboard for half of each day, and spent the other half doing the same with Kanzi and other apes. After a fashion, controlled tests were done contrasting Alia's sentence comprehension with Kanzi's. Overall, Kanzi got 81 percent of these requests correct in controlled trials while Alia was 64 percent correct. The Kanzi work also directly points out the importance of the first few years of infancy for learning language, be the student human or ape.

Recent research by Charles Menzel with Panzee (Pan troglodytes) emphasizes an ape's ability to comprehend and communicate words, actions and information about the past, present and future. Panzee consistently shows extraordinary skill in memory recall as well as communication and future planning by watching an object being hidden in the woods by an experimenter, then directing someone else with no knowledge of either the identity of the item or its hiding place to find it days later. In a recent trial, all 34 items hidden in the woods were found by the searcher with Panzee's help.

We now know that apes, like human children, don't respond particularly well to teaching in the traditional sense but instead seem preprogrammed to learn complex thought by simply paying attention. How do we explain this?

We propose one way of understanding such complex learning processes: the establishment of a triarchic organization of behavior consisting not only of operant and respondent conditioning but also a third class of behavior called "emergents." Emergents are new competencies, never reinforced, that go beyond the effects of association. By establishing such a class of behavior we would be better prepared to measure things like extraordinary adaptations to specific events or situations or unique, unanticipated applications of transfer of learning. Kanzi's learning to read a map of the forest, again without reinforcement, is a good example. Groups of wild bonobos' documented ability to communicate amongst each other by calling and marking foliage as they travel from place to place in separate packs, working to assure that all end up together in the same place at the end of the day, would also serve as an example.

If we are ever to capture true ability, we would be well advised to use all available tools for the job: the establishment of a more comprehensive framework for evaluation of learning would be a first step in the right direction. We cannot truly comprehend the abilities of an individual of any species until we have evaluated him in much the same way we have evaluated ourselves - by our ability to adapt, to truly learn, to be "smart."

Certainly, not all animals have language; arguably, not all apes have language. But it can be said that some apes, such as those studied over three decades at LRC labs, have reliably demonstrated the capacity for this diverse form of expression and proved themselves worthy of future study not only of their ability to communicate but also their complex social and cultural structures, to say nothing of their neurobiology. Additionally, that chimpanzees, and especially bonobos, appear to learn in very much the same way as human infant children serves as a reminder that their lineage is only one percentage point different from ours. Our practice throughout our history of holding them separate must be reevaluated as Pan continually surpasses our best expectations for his performance and gives us so much insight into how all individuals, human or otherwise, can learn.