Chimponauts in Training

At the Aeromedical Field Laboratory, Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, about 20 chimponauts have almost finished their training this week for the fur-raising duty of pioneering in space psychology. Presumably they will teach their tormentors whether a spaceborne man will be psychologically capable of managing the instruments and communications of his swiftly moving craft. Since chimps are easier to train before they reach puberty, the pioneers are all relatively younger than the seven human astronauts, all married and fathers, who are training for the Mercury man-in-space program. Of the more promising chimponauts, only one is American-born (the Fresno, Calif, zoo); the rest were captured in the jungles of equatorial Africa.

Cuddled Recruits. Candidates for chimponaut training are first screened for alertness and proper age (under three years). They are given numbers and dog tags like other Air Force recruits and are isolated for 45 days for detailed health checkups. Because juvenile chimps need loving care, they get plenty of cuddling and attention from human attendants.

After their isolation period, they graduate to a stabilization colony, where they learn the chummy customs of chimp society. Then they are ready for work.

Every morning after a light breakfast of fruit and special chimp chow the chimponauts are given medical examinations and driven in a panel truck to the testing center of the laboratory's Comparative Psychology Branch. There they are taught to wear carefully fitted space suits and to tolerate being strapped for long periods on softly padded contour couches. They are taken up in stunting aircraft to get accustomed to sudden noise, vibration and G forces, and to learn what weightlessness feels like. Even before they have been hardened to all these physiological "insults," their psychological training has begun.

"We are concerned with the effectiveness of an animal in space," says Major Fred H. Rohles, chief of the Comparative Psychology Branch. "Before a man is lifted into space, we must learn whether an animal in space can perform tasks that it has learned on the ground. If the animal's sensory or motor abilities are impaired so it cannot perform these tasks, we must assume that a man suffering the same impairment will be ineffective as a monitor pf dials or as an accurate reporter of information."

Defeated VIP. A typical task taught to chimponauts requires them to watch three shapes flashed on a screen and decide by pushing the proper lever which shape is not like either of the others. By doing this correctly 18 times, a chimp earns a banana-flavored food pellet. Some of them become amazingly skillful. The champion so far is a chimp that worked the levers 7,000 times in 70 minutes with only 32 errors. A human VIP visiting the lab rashly tried the same task and made a much lower score.

More elaborate psychological devices will deliver only one food pellet per minute. Bright chimponauts soon learn this limitation. They work the levers only enough to collect one pellet. Then they goof off for 45 seconds until the machine is ready to start another cycle. "Two years ago," says Psychologist Rohles, "I wouldn't have given a nickel for a carload of chimps, but I can't praise them too highly now." Some of the Air Force psychologists even claim they are afraid to teach the chimps to play poker, for fear they would win all the loose cash on the base.

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