But this is not the whole explanation of how animals cope with delayed gratification, and why they preen themselves or yawn. There are cognitive interpretations, too. Long ago the father of American psychology, William James, proposed “will” and “ego strength” as the basis of self-control. This is how the behavior of children usually is interpreted, as in the following description of the marshmallow test: “The subject can wait most stoically if he expects that he really will get the deferred larger outcome in the waiting paradigm, and wants it very much, but shifts his attention elsewhere and occupies himself internally with cognitive distractions.”33 The emphasis here is on a deliberate, conscious strategy. The child knows what the future holds and wills his mind off the temptation in front of him. Given how similarly children and some animals behave under the same conditions, it is logical to favor the same explanation. Demonstrating impressive willpower, animals too may be aware of their own desires and try to curb them.
To explore this further, I visited Michael Beran, an American colleague at Georgia State University. Mike works at a lab in a large stretch of forest in Decatur, in the middle of the Atlanta area, with roomy accommodations for chimpanzees and monkeys. It is known as the Language Research Center, so named since Kanzi, the symbol-trained bonobo, was its first resident. At the same location, Charlie Menzel conducts tests of spatial memory on apes and Sarah Brosnan studies economic decision making by capuchins. The Atlanta area may well have the world’s highest concentration of primatologists, since they are also found at Zoo Atlanta, in nearby Athens, Georgia, and of course at the Yerkes Primate Center, which historically sparked all this interest. As a result, we have expertise on a wide range of topics.
I asked Mike, who has worked extensively on self-control,34 why articles in this field so often start out with the connection to consciousness, then quickly move to actual behavior without ever returning to the issue of consciousness. Are the authors teasing us? The reason, Mike felt, is that the link with consciousness is rather speculative. Strictly speaking, the fact that animals achieve a better outcome by waiting doesn’t prove that they realize what will happen in the time ahead. On the other hand, their response doesn’t depend on gradual learning, since they generally show it right away. This is why Mike regards self-control decisions as being future-oriented and cognitive. We may not have proof beyond all doubt, but the assumption is that the apes make these decisions based on the anticipation of a better outcome: “To argue that the behavior of apes is entirely under external stimulus control is silly to me.”
Another argument for a cognitive interpretation is their behavior during long waits, which last up to twenty minutes, while candies drop at regular intervals into a bowl. The waiting apes like to play with things during this time, which suggests recognition that they need self-control. Mike described some of the weird things they do to keep themselves busy. Sherman (an adult male chimpanzee) would pick up a candy from the bowl, inspect it, then put it back. Or Panzee would disconnect the tube through which the candies roll in. She’d look at it and shake it before putting it back onto the dispenser. Given toys, they would use them as a distraction to make the wait easier. Such behavior hints at anticipation and strategizing, both of which suggest conscious awareness.
Mike’s interest in this topic was triggered by a legendary experiment on reversal pointing by the American primatologist Sarah Boysen with Sheba, a chimpanzee. Sheba was asked to choose between two cups with different amounts of candy. The catch, however, was that the cup that she’d point at would go to another chimp, leaving her with the alternative cup. Obviously, the smart strategy would be for Sheba to reverse her pointing, indicating the cup with the smaller number of candies. Yet unable to overcome her desire for the fuller cup, she never learned to do so. When the candies were replaced by numbers, however, things changed. Sheba had learned the numbers 1 through 9, knowing the amounts of food associated with them. Presented with two different numbers, she never hesitated to point at the smaller one, showing that she understood how the reversals worked.35
Mike was impressed by Sally’s research showing that chimps can’t get the reversal right with actual candies. This was obviously a matter of self-control. When he tried the same test on his own chimps, they didn’t pass either. Sally’s idea to replace the candies with numbers was brilliant. Whether it is the symbolizing or just the removal of the hedonic property, chimps trained with numerals were really good at it. When I asked if the same had ever been tried with children, Mike’s answer reflected the deep concern of students of animal cognition with fair comparisons: “It may have been tried, I don’t recall, but they probably explained it to the kids, and I would prefer that nothing is explained. We can’t explain it to the apes either.”
Know What You Know
The claim that only humans can mentally hop onto the time train, leaving all other species stranded on the platform, is tied to the fact that we consciously access past and future. Anything related to consciousness has been hard to accept in other species. But this reluctance is problematic: not because we know so much more about consciousness, but because we have growing evidence in other species for episodic memory, future planning, and delayed gratification. Either we abandon the idea that these capacities require consciousness, or we accept the possibility that animals may have it, too.
The fourth spoke on this wheel is metacognition, which is literally cognition about cognition, also known as “thinking about thinking.” When the contestants in a game show are allowed to pick their topic, they obviously name the one they are most familiar with. This is metacognition in action, because it means they know what they know. In the same way, I may answer a question by saying “Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue!” In other words, I suspect that I know the answer, even though it’s taking me time to recall it. A student raising her hand in class in reaction to a question is also relying on metacognition, because she only does so if she thinks she knows the solution. Metacognition rests on an executive function in the brain that allows one to monitor one’s own memory. Again, we associate these processes with consciousness, which is exactly why metacognition, too, was deemed unique to our species.