The Brains of the Animal Kingdom

by Frans de Waal

Wall Street Journal
March 22, 2013

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the "chimpion."

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind's unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Aristotle's idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term"animal cognition" remained an oxymoron.

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Happiness? When It Comes to Rewards, Don’t Count On It

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
March 15, 2013

Unequal treatment tends to make people unhappy. But unequal rewards make people less unhappy when those rewards can’t be counted.

In a series of nine experiments, mostly involving Chinese volunteers, a pair of researchers found that offering unequal rewards for some arbitrary task—in the form of different sized slices of cake, for example—provoked less dissatisfaction than unequal rewards consisting of money.

Moreover, people who missed out on an imaginary buy one, get one free shampoo deal were more upset than those who missed out on the same additional quantity of shampoo packaged in a single larger bottle.

Easily quantifiable rewards such as cash or frequent flyer miles enable people to focus all too easily on how much was received rather than how enjoyable the reward is apart from its quantity, the researchers suggest.

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Cash can bribe dieters to lose weight, study finds

by Marilynn Marchione

Associated Press
March 7, 2013

Willpower apparently can be bought. The chance to win or lose $20 a month enticed dieters in a yearlong study to drop an average of 9 pounds — four times more weight than others who were not offered dough to pass up the doughnuts.

Many employers, insurers and Internet programs dangle dollars to try to change bad habits like smoking or not exercising, but most studies have found this doesn't work very well or for very long.

The new study, done with Mayo Clinic employees, was the longest test yet of financial incentives for weight loss. Doctors think it succeeded because it had a mix of carrots and sticks — penalties for not losing weight, multiple ways to earn cash for succeeding, and a chance to recoup lost money if you fell off the "diet wagon" and later repented.

Incentives are "not like training wheels where people learn healthy habits and then will continue them on their own" — you have to keep them up for them to work, said one study leader, Dr. Steve Driver of Mayo in Rochester, Minn.

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