Pigeon Talk

A triumph for bird brains

Until a few years ago, humans could feel fairly smug about what was thought to be their unique ability to communicate with one another by using spoken language or symbols. Then psychologists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta taught two chimps named Austin and Sherman to "converse" by pushing buttons that displayed various symbols. For probably the first time, two animals were communicating by means other than their usual repertory of gestures, grunts and squeals.

It seemed like an extraordinary display of chimp intelligence, but retired Harvard Psychologist B.F. Skinner was certain that creatures much lower in the evolutionary pecking order could be conditioned to communicate in a similar way. Now the famed behaviorist and two of his students have published convincing evidence in Science to support his controversial belief.

Skinner, with Robert Epstein and Robert Lanza, set up an experiment involving two white male pigeons whimsically dubbed Jack and Jill. Kept in adjoining Plexiglas cubicles, the pigeons were taught by Skinner's conditioning techniques to recognize and depress keys that were identifiable either by color or by words or symbols embossed on them. If they hit the right key with their beaks, it would light up and, as a reward, they automatically got a little grain.

Finally Jack became skilled enough to initiate a "conversation" by depressing a key saying What color? Seeing Jack's key light up, Jill would promptly peek behind a curtain in his own cubicle. There, hidden from Jack's view, one of three bulbs (red, green and yellow) would light up. Having been taught to recognize the color, Jill, moving back in front of Jack, would depress a key identified by a letter representing that color. If Jill correctly chose red, for example, by pressing the R key, the key would light up, and Jack would react by depressing a Thank you key in his cubicle. That would give Jill a few grains of feed.

Eager for his own reward, Jack would then look back at the illuminated symbol key in Jill's cubicle, recognize the R, and depress a red key in his cage. If he deciphered the symbol correctly, he too would get some grain. The birds repeated the cycle again and again with 90% accuracy --sometimes for several hours.

This somewhat satiric demonstration that mere bird brains are capable of "talk' suggests to the Harvard team that it is behavioral conditioning--not some unique characteristic of the brain--that enables pigeons, chimps, and even man, to learn symbolic conversation.

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