Word: premack
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...David Premack actually devised his simple test to study children. First, a child is shown a tableau in which a little girl named Sally puts a marble in her bag and then leaves the room. Before Sally returns, another girl, Ann, takes the marble from Sally's bag and puts it in a box. The child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble when she returns. Three-year-olds will point to the box, because that is where the marble is; but four-year-olds understand that Sally has the mistaken belief that the marble is still...
Psychologist Daniel Povinelli at the University of Southwestern Louisiana has conducted a number of experiments that adapt Premack's test for primates. In one version, chimpanzees had to choose which of two humans would be better at helping them find some hidden food. While the animals themselves could not see where the food was being hidden, they could observe that only one of the two humans had a full view of the process. When asked to choose a helper, the chimps overwhelmingly chose the human who knew where the food was hidden...
Instructors in the seminars tend to mix impressive jargon -- Hersey/ Blanchard situational leadership, Ouchi's Theory Z -- with the homiest of explanations. Introducing the Premack Principle, Larry Baker says, "My mother used to state it functionally: 'Larry, when your room is clean, you may go out to play...
...Psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner of the University of Nevada had managed in the late 1960s to teach the chimp Washoe to use 132 signs; the precocious animal was even credited with having invented a phrase of her own, water bird for swan. About the same time, David Premack, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, using plastic symbols of different shapes and colors to represent words, taught his prize pupil, Sarah, some 130 words and reported that she had also mastered some phrases. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, the husband-wife team of Duane...
Such words touched off angry responses. The Gardners, incensed by Terrace's "weasel talk" and "innuendo," considered suing him. Patterson accused Terrace of "rather muddleheaded methodology." But some of the other researchers are taking a long, hard look at their own work. Premack, now at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks that Terrace's tactic of trying to treat Nim like a human baby was "silly and ill-advised," but he agrees that animals are incapable of spontaneous conversation. The Rumbaughs maintain that their more recent experiments preclude the possibility of trainers giving cues, consciously or sub consciously...