Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some of today's most influential religious figures are no longer theologians but therapists. For Evangelicals, the guru is Colorado's James Dobson, a child psychologist whose daily radio show, Focus on the Family, dispenses advice over 1,200 stations. Among mainline dropouts and seekers the star is Connecticut psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who fused the psychological with the spiritual in The Road Less Traveled, a New York Times paperback best seller for a record 490 weeks. Peck was baptized a Christian in 1980 but sees no reason to join a church; his latest book, A World Waiting...
...grammatical abilities of a 2 1/2-year-old child and a taste for movies about cavemen. The 12-year-old pygmy chimpanzee lives with a colony of other apes in a cage complex on the wooded campus of the Georgia State University Language Research Center, near Atlanta. Under the tutelage of psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, he makes his desires known either by pointing to symbols printed on a laminated board or by punching the symbols on a special keyboard that then generates the words in English. While Kanzi cannot speak (apes lack the vocal control to form words), he understands spoken language...
Kanzi's most noteworthy achievement has been to demonstrate a grasp of grammatical concepts such as word order. Savage-Rumbaugh and psychologist Rose Sevcik created an extended experiment to compare the ape with a two-year-old girl named Alia in responding to commands expressed in 660 spoken English sentences. The sentences combined objects in ways that Kanzi and Alia were unlikely to have encountered before: "Put the melon in the potty," or "Go get the carrot that's in the microwave...
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know precisely what goes on in another creature's mind and to what degree it understands the languages it uses. Take the case of the gorilla Koko, first taught 20 years ago to use American Sign Language by psychologist Penny Patterson. On one much discussed occasion, the powerful gorilla had inadvertently knocked a sink off its moorings in her living quarters. Koko signed the words "Kate there bad," pointing to the sink. Was the muscular animal trying, rather implausibly, to shift the blame to one of Patterson's slightly built female assistants...
...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...