The Structure of Learning: From Sign Stimuli To Sign Language

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Drawing together research and theory in ethology and psychology, this book offers a clear and provocative account of the ways in which living organisms learn. Throughout, the authors' focus is on the importance of operational definition.

In lively prose, describing experiments in enough depth to involve readers in the drama of experimental method, they recount the history of scientists' attempts to answer basic questions, and show how one study builds on another. Although they present the major traditional positions, they demand that readers examine actual evidence, recognize weaknesses, and consider alternatives.

This critical process leads to the delineation of a bottom up, feed forward model in contrast to the traditional top down, feed backward one. Recent research in robotics and fuzzy logic suggests ways in which artificial as well as living systems pursue bottom up, feed forward ethological solutions to practical problems. The authors' extended discussion of their exciting work teaching sign language to chimpanzees vividly illustrates the application of the basic principles of learning elucidated in the book.

The Structure of Learning: From Sign Stimuli To Sign Language Review

R. Allen Gardner and wife Beatrix T. Gardner are professors of comparative psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and most famous for conducting Project Washoe, an attempt to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee. (See also their book Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees.) Allen Gardner states in the Preface to this 1998 book, "Although we planned from the beginning to write a book like this one, our sign language studies of chimpanzees absorbed most of our efforts for many years. Meanwhile, a wave of new experiments appeared that challenged the folk wisdom in traditional theories and traditional books. By now these findings have been well documented and thoroughly replicated. The new findings point to the same ethological pattern, in the nursery school and the Skinner box, in rats and pigeons, in children and chimpanzees. At the same time, fresh developments in computer science offer fresh insights into the behavior of autonomous living systems. It seems like a good time to incorporate the new developments into this new book."

They state, "This was the innovation of Project Washoe. For the first time, the human foster family used a gestural rather than a vocal language."

They criticize the results of Herbert Terrace (see his book, Nim, A Chimpanzee who Learned Sign Language): "a prominent student of B.F. Skinner fielded a rigorously operant version of Project Washoe, with the chimpanzee Nim. This was carried to the point where research assistants were forbidden to treat Nim like a child. They were even forbidden to comfort him if he cried out in the night. Training sessions took place in a small room designed to simulate an operant conditioning chamber. Mostly, training sessions consisted of demonstrating signs for Nim to imitate and showing him things to name, then rewarding correct responses promptly with the requested object or with some other treat. It is hardly surprising that videotape records of these training sessions showed Nim mostly imitating the trainer's signs and begging for treats."

Toward the end of the book, they admit, "we can never know what the chimpanzees were signing; we only know what the observers reported. Indeed, a major objective of the tests was to verify the independent agreement between observers."

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