Muhamed was a German horse reportedly able to mentally extract the cube roots of numbers, which he would then tap out with his hooves. Raised in the town of Elberfeld by Karl Krall in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he was one of several supposedly gifted horses, the others being Kluge Hans, Zarif, Amassis, and later Bento, a blind stallion. Muhamed, the most gifted of the animals, could also allegedly perform music and even distinguish between harmony and discord.[1]
While all the horses raised by Krall could demonstrate an apparent ability to read and do basic arithmetic, Muhamed could seemingly perform complicated calculations. When tested by psychologists and scientists, a number was written on a blackboard, and Muhamed was asked to extract the cube root. His left foot represented the tens, while his right foot represented the ones, so that in order to give the answer sixty-five, he would tap six times with his left foot and five times with his right. This method of tapping was also used to demonstrate the horse's spelling, although according to reports, they did not correctly handle German orthography. Krall himself professed disbelief in the notion that Muhamed might be some sort of genius, arguing that human savants are also able to perform mathematical functions rapidly in their heads.
Scientists examining the horses attempted various tests to prove that the horses were being signaled the answers by Krall, and even attempted to blindfold the horses by tying sacks over their heads,[2] and by observing them in the stable through peepholes.[3]
According to Krall, Muhamed, the most intelligent of the horses, eventually began to communicate spontaneously, sometimes even tattling on the other horses for being lazy, or even on the grooms for beating them.
Among the scholars who tested the horses and came away impressed by them were psychologist Edward Claparède, who claimed that they were genuine, and Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, who claimed that Krall had "humanized" the horses.[4]
Muhamed disappeared in World War I, in which he served as a draft animal.
Washoe was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using some American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition.
Comparative psychology is the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals, especially as these relate to the phylogenetic history, adaptive significance, and development of behavior. The phrase comparative psychology may be employed in either a narrow or a broad meaning. In its narrow meaning, it refers to the study of the similarities and differences in the psychology and behavior of different species. In a broader meaning, comparative psychology includes comparisons between different biological and socio-cultural groups, such as species, sexes, developmental stages, ages, and ethnicities. Research in this area addresses many different issues, uses many different methods and explores the behavior of many different species, from insects to primates.
Clever Hans was a horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues. In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition. Pfungst was an assistant to German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, who incorporated the experience with Hans into his further work on animal psychology and his ideas on phenomenology.
The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse performance. It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he created that the statue came to life. The psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson present a view, that has been called into question as a result of later research findings, in their book Pygmalion in the Classroom; borrowing something of the myth by advancing the idea that teachers' expectations of their students affect the students' performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson held that high expectations lead to better performance and low expectations lead to worse, both effects leading to self-fulfilling prophecy.
Observer bias is one of the types of detection bias and is defined as any kind of systematic divergence from accurate facts during observation and the recording of data and information in studies. The definition can be further expanded upon to include the systematic difference between what is observed due to variation in observers, and what the true value is.
Alex was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment.
The observer-expectancy effect is a form of reactivity in which a researcher's cognitive bias causes them to subconsciously influence the participants of an experiment. Confirmation bias can lead to the experimenter interpreting results incorrectly because of the tendency to look for information that conforms to their hypothesis, and overlook information that argues against it. It is a significant threat to a study's internal validity, and is therefore typically controlled using a double-blind experimental design.
Great ape language research historically involved attempts to teach chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans to communicate using imitative human speech, sign language, physical tokens and computerized lexigrams. These studies were controversial, with debate focused on the definition of language, the welfare of test subjects, and the anthropocentric nature of this line of inquiry.
Natalya "Natasha" Nikolayevna Demkina is a Russian woman who claims to possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical diagnoses. Since the age of ten, she has performed readings in Russia. She is widely known by the childhood variant of her given name, Natasha. In 2004 she appeared on television shows in the United Kingdom, on the Discovery Channel and in Japan. Since 2004 Demkina has been a full-time student of the Semashko State Stomatological University, Moscow. Since January 2006, Demkina has worked for the Center of Special Diagnostics of the Natalya Demkina (TSSD), whose stated purpose is to diagnose and treat illness in cooperation with "experts possessing unusual abilities, folk healers and professionals of traditional medicine". Many experts are skeptical of her claims.
Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, academic, and proponent of eugenics. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford School of Education. Terman is best known for his revision of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. As a prominent eugenicist, he was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Terman as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with G. Stanley Hall.
Table-turning is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations. The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits; the alphabet would be slowly spoken aloud and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences. The process is similar to that of a Ouija board. Scientists and skeptics consider table-turning to be the result of the ideomotor effect, or of conscious trickery.
Molyneux's problem is a thought experiment in philosophy concerning immediate recovery from blindness. It was first formulated by William Molyneux, and notably referred to in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). The problem can be stated in brief, "if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed?"
"The First Men" is a 1960 science fiction short story by American writer Howard Fast. It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in February 1960. It was later printed bundled with "The Martian Shop" (1959) in The Edge of Tomorrow. A full version of the story was also included in The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973) edited by Brian Aldiss. It is now freely available online.
The psychic staring effect is the claimed extrasensory ability of a person to detect being stared at. The idea was first explored by psychologist Edward B. Titchener in 1898 after students in his junior classes reported being able to "feel" when somebody was looking at them, even though they could not see this person. Titchener performed a series of laboratory experiments that found only negative results. The effect has been the subject of contemporary attention from parapsychologists and other researchers from the 1980s onwards, most notably Rupert Sheldrake.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).
The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century. Evolution and natural selection has been applied to the study of human communication, mainly by Charles Darwin in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his materialist theory of unguided evolution. He proposed that much like other traits found in animals, emotions apparently also evolved and were adapted over time. His work looked at not only facial expressions in animals and specifically humans, but attempted to point out parallels between behaviors in humans and other animals.
The Hundesprechschule Asra or Tiersprechschule Asra was an institution for performing dogs that existed in Leutenberg, Thuringia, Germany, from 1930 until near the end of World War II. The founder, Margarethe Schmidt taught her dogs a number of tricks, including vocal expression, and had them perform in public. In 2011, a non-fiction book published in Great Britain by Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities led to interest in the English-speaking press. The book used it as an example of Nazi-sponsored animal research. The story was sensationalized in the book, However, there is no evidence of a connection to the Nazi war effort, and the school was privately run.
Rolf was an Airedale terrier that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and communicate with humans on an intellectual level.
Number sense in animals is the ability of creatures to represent and discriminate quantities of relative sizes by number sense. It has been observed in various species, from fish to primates. Animals are believed to have an approximate number system, the same system for number representation demonstrated by humans, which is more precise for smaller quantities and less so for larger values. An exact representation of numbers higher than three has not been attested in wild animals, but can be demonstrated after a period of training in captive animals.
Der Begriff des Instinktes einst und jetzt is a book written by Heinrich Ernst Ziegler. Its first edition was published in the Zoologische Jahrbücher, Supplement VII in 1904. The second edition, published 1910 by Gustav Fisher in Jena and third edition, published in 1920 under the same publisher both received several extensions. The book is about the history of the concept instinct and the different conceptions of the animal psyche throughout history, as well as the understanding of these concepts at the time the book was published. Furthermore, it discusses the implications of Charles Darwin's theory of common descent for comparative psychology.
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