We associate research in the natural habitat with sacrifice and bravery, since fieldworkers must tackle the unpleasant and dangerous creatures of the tropical rainforest, from bloodsucking leeches to predators and snakes. By contrast, students of captive animals are thought to have it easy. But we sometimes forget how much courage it takes to defend one’s ideas in the face of staunch opposition. Most of the time this occurs just among academics, which is disagreeable rather than hazardous, but Nadia Kohts faced lethal risks. Her full name was Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts, and she lived and worked early last century in the shadow of the Kremlin. Under the sinister influence of the would-be geneticist Trofim Lysenko, Joseph Stalin had many a brilliant Russian biologist either shot or sent to the Gulag for thinking the wrong thoughts. Lysenko believed that plants and animals pass on traits gained during their lifetime. The names of those who disagreed with him became unmentionable, and entire research institutes were closed down.
It was in this oppressive climate that Kohts, with her husband Alexander Fiodorovich Kohts—founding director of Moscow’s State Darwin Museum—set out to study ape facial expressions, inspired by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by that bourgeois Englishman, Charles Darwin. Lysenko was distinctly ambivalent about Darwin’s theory, some of which he labeled “reactionary.” Staying out of trouble became a major preoccupation of the Kohtses, who hid documents and data among their taxidermy collection in the museum basement. They wisely put a large statue of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—famous proponent of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—at the museum entrance.
Kohts published in French, German, and most of all her native Russian. She wrote seven books, of which only one was translated into English, long after its appearance in 1935. The English version of Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child, edited by me, appeared in 2002. The book compares the emotional life and intelligence of a young chimpanzee, Joni, with that of Kohts’s little son, Roody. Kohts studied Joni’s reactions to pictures of chimpanzees and other animals, and to his own mirror image. Even though Joni was probably too young to recognize himself, Kohts describes how he would entertain himself in front of his reflection by pulling weird faces and sticking out his tongue.2
Kohts is little known compared to Wolfgang K?hler, who conducted his groundbreaking ape research from 1912 through 1920. I wonder what she knew about it while working in Moscow from 1913 until Joni’s premature death in 1916. While K?hler is widely recognized as a pioneer of evolutionary cognition, pictures of Kohts’s work leave little doubt that she was on exactly the same track. One of the museum’s glass cases features Joni’s mounted body surrounded by ladders and tools, including sticks that fit into each other. Was Kohts overlooked by science due to her gender? Or was it her language?
I learned about her from the writings of Robert Yerkes, who came to Moscow to discuss her projects through an interpreter. In his books, Yerkes described Kohts’s work with the greatest admiration. There is a good chance, for example, that Kohts invented the matching-to-sample (MTS) paradigm, a staple of modern cognitive neuroscience. MTS is nowadays being applied to both humans and animals in countless laboratories. Kohts would hold up an object for Joni, then hide it among other objects in a sack and let him feel around to find the first one. The test involved two modalities—vision and touch—demanding that Joni make a choice based on his memory of the previously seen model.
Nadia Ladygina-Kohts was a pioneer in animal cognition, who studied not only primates but also parrots, such as this macaw. Working in Moscow at around the same time that K?hler conducted his research, she remains far less known.
My own fascination with this unsung hero’s work took me to Moscow, too. I received a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, where I leafed through private picture albums. Kohts was (and is) much beloved in her country, where she is widely recognized as the great scientist that she was. My biggest surprise was to learn that she owned at least three large parrots. Pictures show her accepting an object handed to her by a cockatoo, and her holding out a tray with three cups toward a macaw. The parrots would sit opposite her, on a table, while Kohts held a small food reward in one hand and a pencil in the other, scoring their choices as she tested their ability to discriminate among objects. I checked with our contemporary expert on Psittaciformes, the American psychologist Irene Pepperberg, but she had never heard of Kohts’s parrot studies. I doubt that anyone in the West ever suspected that bird cognition, too, was studied in Russia well before it became more widely known.
Alex the Parrot
I first met Alex, the African gray that Irene raised and studied for three decades, on visits to her department from a nearby university. Irene had bought the bird in a pet store, in 1977, and was setting up an ambitious project that would open the public eye to the avian mind. It ended up paving the way for all subsequent studies of bird intelligence, because until then the general opinion had been that bird brains simply don’t support advanced cognition. Due to their lack of much of anything that looks like a mammalian cortex, birds were viewed as well endowed with instincts yet poor at learning, let alone thinking. Despite the fact that their brains can be quite sizable—the African gray’s is the size of a shelled walnut, with a large area that functions like a cerebral cortex—and that their natural behavior offers ample reason to question the low opinion of them, the different brain organization of birds has been held against them.
Having myself kept and studied jackdaws—members of that other large-brained bird family, the corvids—I have never had any doubt about their behavioral flexibility. On walks through the park, my birds would tease dogs by flying right in front of their heads, just out of reach of their snapping mouths, to the surprise and chagrin of the dog owners. Indoors, they would play object hiding with me: I would hide a small item, such as a cork, under a pillow or behind a flower pot, while they would try to find it, or vice versa. This game relied on the well-known food-caching talents of crows and jays but also suggested object permanence: the understanding that an object continues to exist even after it has disappeared from view. The extreme playfulness of my jackdaws hinted, as it does with animals in general, at high intelligence and the thrill of a challenge. Visiting Irene, I was quite prepared to be impressed by a bird, therefore, and Alex did not disappoint. Cockily sitting on his perch, he had begun to learn labels for items such as keys, triangles, and squares, saying “key,” “three-corner,” or “four-corner” whenever these objects were pointed out.