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The Ape and the
Child: A Study of Environmental Influence Upon Early Behavior, published in 1933 by Winthrop and
Luella Kellogg, describes their study of Gua, an infant chimpanzee, reared
with their own infant son, Donald, for a period of nine months in the early
30's. A copy of the book is available in York's Scott library (BF 671 K4
1967). Read a
brief description of the Kellogg's research with Gua here. John
Limber, who teaches a course on primate psychology at the University of New
Hampshire, provides some additional information on the Kellogg's research. The two links on his site are
broken, but I have provided a working link to a film featuring Donald and Gua
below. |
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Benjamin
and Bruce describe the Kellogg's rationale for their investigation as
follows: The idea for the study emerged in 1927 when Kellogg was
still a graduate student at Columbia University. Kellogg and Kellogg (1933)
give us that date for the idea but not its source. However, our guess is that
it was stimulated by an article on the "wolf children" of India
which was published that year in the American Journal of Psychology (Squires, 1927). Similar to Itard's "wild
boy of Aveyron," the wolf children were two young girls found in a cave
inhabited by wolves. These children behaved as though they were wolves,
eating and drinking like those animals and making no use of their hands
except to crawl around on all fours, which was their method of locomotion.
Eventually the girls learned to walk upright, although they could never run.
One acquired speech, at least a vocabulary of approximately 100 words, but
the other continued only to make grunting noises. Howling noises at night
were never extinguished, nor were their human teachers able to break them of
the rather distasteful habit of "pouncing upon and devouring small birds
and mammals" (Kellogg, 1931b, p. 162). Both girls died at an early age.
Like other feral children, the wolf children were judged to be sub-normal in
intelligence and it was assumed that their intellectual deficits prevented
them from being able to adapt to their new surroundings. This interpretation
was common in explaining the problems of adjustment in feral children and
was, in fact, the explanation offered by Squires (1927). Kellogg disagreed
with that interpretation, and in two replies published in the American
Journal of Psychology (1931c, 1934), he argued that the wolf children, and
others like them, were probably born of normal intelligence. Indeed, it was
unlikely that they would otherwise have been capable of survival. From his
environmentalistic perspective he contended that these children learned to be
wild animals because that was exactly what their environment demanded of
them. He believed in the strong impact of early experience and the existence
of critical periods in development, and he maintained that the problem with
civilizing feral children was the difficulty of overturning the habits
learned early in life. [from p. 466 of Benjamin, L. T. & Bruce, D.
(1982). From bottle-fed chimp to bottlenose dolphin: A contemporary appraisal
of Winthrop Kellogg. The Psychological Record, 32, 461-482.] The Kellogg's work was not highly regarded by many
Psychologists because they felt that the central importance of environmental
factors in development was already well established. However, I wonder if the
holistic, non-laboratory nature of much of the setup wasn't also a problem for many. Nevertheless, the
investigation caught the imagination of the public. The following are two
media reports from the 30's when the
Kellogg's were first reporting their
results: A
1932 article in The Evening Independent, a St. Petersburg, Florida,
newspaper A 1933 article in Time Magazine This
twelve-minute film shows Donald and Gua in some of the various
comparisons that the Kellogg's made between them. Gua is not the only chimpanzee to be home reared. Keith and
Catherine Hayes raised a chimpanzee named Viki in their home in the late 40's.
A report on her intellectual
development over the first three years of her life is available in their
article The
Intellectual Development of a Home-Raised Chimpanzee. The research of both the Kellogg's and the Hayes' raises questions about the possibility of language
development in animals other than humans. I discuss a few aspects of this
topic in the March
10 lecture, and we will pursue the topic of language in apes further in a
few weeks. If you are eager to pursue the issue now, some basics are available
on this website. Possible future addition for this page: I haven't read the following book review yet, but I have made a
note of it so that I don't forget about it. I think it will be interesting to
see what a psychoanalyst has to say about the Kellogg's investigation: Gosselin, R. (1933). The ape and the
child. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, 643-645. (BF 173 A2 P7, a review
of the Kellogg's book) |