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Education Science

Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way 91

Posted by Zonk from the we're-all-ugly-bags-of-mostly-water dept.
Lucas123 writes "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"
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Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way More

Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way

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  • Learning (Score:5, Funny)

    by phoenixwade ( 997892 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @05:43PM (#20094397)
    So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by iknownuttin ( 1099999 )
      So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......

      You must cease and desist! That is the trade secret of the writers of the "Jerry Springer" show. If you fail to comply, you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and then be put on the show and have your ass kicked by some hick and or ho.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by BlueParrot ( 965239 )

      So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......
      Yes, but there would be infinite amounts of DRM to make you watch the infinitely long adds...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 )
      > So If we get an infinite number of Humans, and have them type on an infinite number of Typewriters, We'll still have a season of crap on TV.......

      An infinite number of rednecks, an infinite number of shotguns, and an infinitely-long Texas highway, will eventually reproduce this Slashdot thread. In Braille.

    • I have the show's title in mind already... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Monkey See Monkey Do" produced by ABC and watched by fifty million apes :)

      Side note: I am NOT stereotyping monkeys as being apes by the way.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Cryacin ( 657549 )
      And in the red corner, the leader of the "free" world... GEEEORRRGEEE DUBYA!!!! And in the blue corner, coming from the deep dark depths of the African jungle, Bubu the chimp. Honey, which is which?
    • Well, yes, that I think is proven already.

    • The important thing is that (Score:5, Funny)

      by igny ( 716218 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @07:29PM (#20095455) Homepage Journal
      No monkeys are left behind.
    • ....an infinite number of nerds......keyboards... you'd have..............Slashdot
    • What remotely intelligent animal doesn't learn that way? The reason why humans and monkeys learn in that way is because the brain is pretty limitless (Google "savants"), but subconsciously chooses only things that it knows will be of importance.
      • Good point, I guess the opposite result would be more surprising-- like if the monkey learned from the newspaper they put in front of it :)
  • ....done by monkies.

    And I bet if they tried other animals they would find the same thing.

    However there are some in the computer industry that have yet to grasp that in providing the users with the ability to be interactive..

    I just haven't figured out what kind of creature doesn't understand the natural doing feedback loop in learning.
  • That little guy has been keeping us dumb(and annoyed) for years.

  • yup, just like humans (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    if you poke the right buttons on the computer thing, the big man in the suit gives you a treat.

  • we needed more research on this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brre ( 596949 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @05:51PM (#20094505)
    This has been well established for decades across a wide variety of species. The result is entirely unsurprising. The only way this would have been newsworthy would be if the result had been the exact opposite.
    • What research are you thinking of?

      They were testing the so-called "generation effect" where recall results in greater learning than observation. I am not aware of any other test of this in monkeys and there are none cited in their article either. A quick search on pubmed does not reveal anything either. Would you clarify what you think they and I have overlooked?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by brre ( 596949 )
        Sure: a century or so of results, starting with Thorndike, that suggest exactly the result obtained. Task analysis, contingency analysis, what pays off, what was learned.

        "Observation" is poorly defined here which may confuse things. It is possible for what gets called observation to pay off in some situations, e.g. transfer of stimulus control. That doesn't change the general phenomenon: active involvement increases learning, which is well known.

        If the result here had been that mere presentation of hint

    • ...what would you do if you held a flame war but no one came? Only 62 posts all day. Surely this featured on the front page was supposed to elicit hundreds of "evolution is fact", "no it isn't", "yes it is" back-and-forths. Predictably, a couple of commenters even dragged Dubya and Republicans into the "discussion", and still no sparks. As unlikely as it may have seemed, I think even the masses of dullards here might be starting to catch on to what's going on, that they're being played. If we just stop taki
  • "In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row." Primates using an ATM? That's monkey business!

  • Sample size of 2? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 1729 ( 581437 ) <slashdot1729&gmail,com> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @05:59PM (#20094597)
    Even if the rest of the methodology is sound (and based on the description in TFA, I'm skeptical), an experiment two subjects is not sufficient for their conclusions. With only two subjects, any conclusion is suspect.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by 1729 ( 581437 )

      an experiment two subjects

      Oops, that should be: "an experiment with two subjects

    • Re:Sample size of 2? (Score:5, Informative)

      by venicebeach ( 702856 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:34PM (#20094929) Homepage Journal
      Not too unusual for a psych experiment with monkeys.

      Rather than gather a large number of subjects, they repeated the experiment many times within each subject. The two monkeys (Macduff and Oberon) each studied 18-20 lists. On the fourth and final day of testing, recall for the lists for which they were given hints was close to 0%. For the lists where they were not given hints, recall was about 50% for one monkey and 70% for the other, a statistically significant effect within each subject.

      The point is that the act of recalling the information is a powerfull learning event. Don't look at the other side of the flash card too quickly.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by brre ( 596949 )
        A reasonable point.

        Here's a different way to analyse it: contingencies. Contingency A: get a correct answer. Contingency B: get a correct answer or get help. Turns out you get faster acquisition on A than B. There's actually a family of B, however: time between question and hint, payoff for a correct response with hint versus without. Further analysis along these parameters would reveal if hints are uniformly toxic to learning. My guess: the value of hints is vastly overestimated by most teachers and lea

    • You're right that n is too small.

      They should have went to the Wal-Mart for more test subjects.
    • Well, at least they'll be half right. 33%?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by machinelou ( 1119861 )
      The notion that "the number of subjects" has any bearing on the quality of an experiment or the degree to which the results can be trusted is somewhat off the mark. The better metric is the number of times the effect has been demonstrated. Effects can be demonstrated both across and within subjects. However, the number of times an effect has been demonstrated becomes less important the more we (the scientific community) are familiar with the relevant baseline. You don't have to throw a brick through a w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jafiwam ( 310805 )
      What, are you suggesting that monkeys (who are probably cousins or something) learn SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENTLY from the next monkey in the line of cages?

      Seriously, that's like assuming that one needs to make statistical surveys to realize that perhaps this animal has fur, or does not have fur?

      It's not a drug trial, it's a learning study. Learning that is pretty much built in and hard wired and generally not a variable in most critters.

      Unless you are one of those people that goes around believing the can of

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 1729 ( 581437 )

        What, are you suggesting that monkeys (who are probably cousins or something) learn SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENTLY from the next monkey in the line of cages?

        Yes, perhaps.

        Learning that is pretty much built in and hard wired and generally not a variable in most critters.

        That's a bold assumption. Where is the science to back it up?
    • As others have pointed out, the n you should be looking at in this situation is not the number of monkeys, but the number of times they run the learning experiment; remember, what you're looking for in Science is repeatable results. So, the task of this experiment is to see if a given monkey will show repeatable results with the experiment they've defined. We have already done many experiments (or, more precisely, taken many observations) that lead us to suspect that more most intents and purposes one Rhesu

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by brre ( 596949 )
      Wrong. A within subject design can generate reliable results with just a few subjects. You're thinking of a between subject design, one of whose drawbacks is the requirement for more subjects.
  • monkey do"

    with enough time, all nuggets of conventional wisdom will be verified scientifically
    • It is disturbing how accurate that comment has just become...
      • I assume that our forefathers who conceived this idiom did so on the basis of solid observation and experience of the subject. The phrase wasn't just plucked out of the air.
  • SuperMemo [supermemo.com] is an interesting software package that helps with memorization and even "reading thousands of web pages at once." Seriously. To my memory, the story goes something like this: Piotr Wozniak was studying molecular biology in Poland and realized that the amount of information he had to consume was way above the limits of what he was going to achieve with the methods he was using to study. Mainly concerned about his uptake of tens of thousands of English words, he began tracking his own memory, recal
  • This story has been brought to you by monkeys, and the letter 18.
  • I don't see what use this could have.

    I mean, sure they might have found a way to get monkeys to learn things, but do they really expect to apply that research to teenagers?

    - RG>
    • Haha, no. Primate behavior, learning, communication, etc. research does not have a singular goal. If there were one overarching purpose, though (aside from knowledge for its own sake), it would be in discovering how close on the continuum they are to us and what that means to human identity. Take any activity, any brain pattern, any quirk humans have, and you will discover that in most cases apes display those to a certain extent. Sally Boysen (the scientist with whose research I am most familiar since she
      • Ugh, I forgot to add:

        A major discovery of hers was that chimps display actual altruism, just like humans.

        (Which always comes as a nice argument when talking to Republicans or to other people who claim that altruism is only a result of societal expectations.
        I keed, I keed.
        No, I don't.)
  • I'm not surprised that primates (and us) learn better when actively engaged in the material. I've always gotten far more out of classes in which the instructor forced the class to be engaged in the material/lesson than ones where a human tranquilizer of an instructor would bore us to sleep.

  • monkey thought processes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rudisaurus ( 675580 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:28PM (#20094875)

    'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"
    "Monkey, am I ever getting tired of these stupid tests!"

    "Hey, idea, Jimbo: let's pretend not to get it when they give us the 'hints' tomorrow ... really dork up their results!"

  • "The findings were somewhat unintuitive, because passively using the hint appeared to enhance performance during the study phase of the experiment but had a deleterious effect on long-term learning," Kornell said.

    Yeah, completely unintuitive that monkeys remember better when they have to memorize the thing they're supposed to remember. The only thing that is unintuitive is that someone let you play with monkeys.
  • It makes sense that a study on how to teach monkeys would come out of UCLA, because I can really see it having some practical applications for the students there.

    (Yes, I went to USC.)
    • Except that the research was done at Columbia. The guy just made the wise decision to come to UCLA when he was done. :-)

  • Original research abstract (Score:4, Informative)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:54PM (#20095127) Journal
    In the interest of elevating the level of discussion about this research (hah!), below is the original research article and abstract. The article itself probably needs an institutional subscription to access:

    http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j .1467-9280.2007.01959.x [blackwell-synergy.com]

    The Generation Effect in Monkeys

    Nate Kornell, Herbert S. Terrace

    ABSTRACT--How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.

  • "In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water.

    And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live.

    So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands, and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog.

    And then this monkey-fish-frog had bu

  • Monkey see, monkey do? (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @08:50PM (#20096183)
    monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved

    Father Monkey: Son. That poo won't throw itself...

  • Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy!
  • If we know primates are very similar to humans, when will we stop locking them in captivity and poking and prodding them for our narrow gains? I'm saddened that UCLA does useless research on primates.
    • Yeah, right, it's completely useless to study how learning works in one of the closest animals to humans genetically. Probably a stupid question, but are you just trolling or do you actually believe this shit?
    • But I would point out that the kind of research that was done in this case is most often done on humans.

      You raise an interesting point. Most Slashdotters would have not much difficulty in accepting that an intelligent machine, if it were sufficiently similar to us in mental capacities, might be for ethical purposes a person. What about animals then? We know that some animals are human. How close to human does an animal have to be to become, ethically speaking, a person?
  • Monkeys also crap just like humans do! The only difference of course being that afterwards they throw it.
  • The summary claims that the monkeys learned to correctly "put up to 18 photos...in a row." However, TFA states that the two rhesus macaques "learned to place five photographs in a particular order" and that "In all, each monkey learned to order at least 18 separate series of photographs". I won't make any claims as to which task is easier, but I wanted to clear up that particular point for those few who skip straight to the comments.
  • Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way

    Monkeys read Slashdot?!?

  • Finally an explanation to the Steve Ballmer monkey dance. I was really wondering about that one.
  • Well I'll be a Monkeys Uncle. This is news is bannanas.
  • FTFA:

    A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved [CC] in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily."

    Reminds of two old sayings:

    If you really want to understand something, try explaining it to someone else.

    Tell me, and I will forget...
    Show me, and I may remember...
    Involve me, and I will understand.

  • Poops in hand...

    Flings it at you...

    Grins and applauds.

  • "that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved"

    Yeah...and so do dogs. They learn tricks faster when they're involved rather than just watching another dog do it.
    • True. Dogs are a lot smarter. WTF. Can someone tell these weirdos to stop comparing humans to monkeys? Get it through your thick skulls you god haters: Wherever we come from, our "creator" looks like us, not like a monkey.
  • ... do they go on-line, find some p0rn and spank the human?

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