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Herbert S. Terrace
Herbert S. Terrace (born 29 November 1936) is a professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. His work covers a broad set of research interests that include behaviorism, animal cognition, ape language and the evolution of language. He is the author of Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language (1979) and Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can (2019). Terrace has made important contributions to comparative psychology, many of which have important implications for human psychology. These include discrimination learning, ape language, the evolution of language, and animal cognition.
Terrace was born and raised in Brooklyn as the youngest child of two Polish immigrants.[citation needed] He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York. His interest in science was instilled by an older sister, Dr. Dorothy Krieger, who won a Lasker Award for her research in endocrinology.[citation needed]
Terrace obtained a Bachelor of Arts in psychology (1957) and a Master of Arts in Experimental Psychology (1958) from Cornell University, where he was a Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation Fellow (1957–1958). His mentor during graduate studies was Julian Hochberg. He obtained his PhD in psychology (1961) from Harvard University, where his mentor was B. F. Skinner. At Harvard, he was a USPHS Pre-Doctoral Fellow (1959–1961)
Learning by trial and error is a basic feature of conditioning theory. For his doctoral dissertation, Terrace showed that it was possible to train a discrimination without any errors. He did this with pigeons who learned to discriminate two narrowly spaced stimuli by starting with a large distance between the discriminative stimuli that was gradually reduced. When a discrimination is trained with errors, subjects exhibit frustration. Such aversive effects are absent when a discrimination is trained without errors. Skinner cited a similar difference in the case of the teaching machine, a device he invented to train human subjects to learn different types of technical material. The teaching machine introduces a new topic with simple questions that are gradually made more difficult. Subjects who learn with few or no errors do not exhibit the frustration they would have experienced had they learned by trial and error.
Terrace joined other leading behaviorists challenging Noam Chomsky's theory that only humans can learn language and grammar. With Project Nim, he attempted to teach a chimpanzee (Nim Chimpsky), to learn American Sign Language (ASL). Sign language was used because of the physical limitations of a chimpanzee's vocal apparatus. Nim's vocabulary grew steadily and he began to combine signs. However, analyses of videotapes of Nim signing with his teachers showed that most of his signs were cued by a teacher's prompts.
Terrace concluded that the only reason Nim (and other chimpanzees) signed was to obtain rewards. Were it not for his teacher, Nim would try to grab a reward directly. When that failed, Nim's only alternative was to sign. Anticipating his signing, Nim's teachers unwittingly made one or more appropriate signs, about a quarter of a second before he signed. Terrace also showed that prompting explained the signing of other chimpanzees who were trained to use ASL.
Because chimpanzees only signed to obtain rewards, their signing was, by definition, limited to the imperative function of words. That differs fundamentally from its declarative function, which is to name objects conversationally. Imperatives are a minuscule portion of human vocabulary. If human communication were limited to imperatives, language would have never evolved. Initially, Terrace hoped that combinations of a chimpanzee's signs would provide evidence that it could create a sentence. What Project Nim showed, however, is that a chimpanzee cannot even use signs declaratively. Until a chimpanzee can learn words, he concluded that it's pointless to ask if it can create a sentence.
The negative results of Project Nim posed two questions: why can a chimpanzee not learn language, words in particular, and which of our ancestors was the first species to use words? To answer the first question, Terrace cited recent discoveries by developmental psychologists who showed that infants experience two non-verbal relations with their caretakers, intersubjectivity and joint attention, before they learn to name objects. He argued that the absence of those precursors in chimpanzees is the best explanation for their failure to learn words.
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Herbert S. Terrace
Herbert S. Terrace (born 29 November 1936) is a professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. His work covers a broad set of research interests that include behaviorism, animal cognition, ape language and the evolution of language. He is the author of Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language (1979) and Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can (2019). Terrace has made important contributions to comparative psychology, many of which have important implications for human psychology. These include discrimination learning, ape language, the evolution of language, and animal cognition.
Terrace was born and raised in Brooklyn as the youngest child of two Polish immigrants.[citation needed] He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York. His interest in science was instilled by an older sister, Dr. Dorothy Krieger, who won a Lasker Award for her research in endocrinology.[citation needed]
Terrace obtained a Bachelor of Arts in psychology (1957) and a Master of Arts in Experimental Psychology (1958) from Cornell University, where he was a Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation Fellow (1957–1958). His mentor during graduate studies was Julian Hochberg. He obtained his PhD in psychology (1961) from Harvard University, where his mentor was B. F. Skinner. At Harvard, he was a USPHS Pre-Doctoral Fellow (1959–1961)
Learning by trial and error is a basic feature of conditioning theory. For his doctoral dissertation, Terrace showed that it was possible to train a discrimination without any errors. He did this with pigeons who learned to discriminate two narrowly spaced stimuli by starting with a large distance between the discriminative stimuli that was gradually reduced. When a discrimination is trained with errors, subjects exhibit frustration. Such aversive effects are absent when a discrimination is trained without errors. Skinner cited a similar difference in the case of the teaching machine, a device he invented to train human subjects to learn different types of technical material. The teaching machine introduces a new topic with simple questions that are gradually made more difficult. Subjects who learn with few or no errors do not exhibit the frustration they would have experienced had they learned by trial and error.
Terrace joined other leading behaviorists challenging Noam Chomsky's theory that only humans can learn language and grammar. With Project Nim, he attempted to teach a chimpanzee (Nim Chimpsky), to learn American Sign Language (ASL). Sign language was used because of the physical limitations of a chimpanzee's vocal apparatus. Nim's vocabulary grew steadily and he began to combine signs. However, analyses of videotapes of Nim signing with his teachers showed that most of his signs were cued by a teacher's prompts.
Terrace concluded that the only reason Nim (and other chimpanzees) signed was to obtain rewards. Were it not for his teacher, Nim would try to grab a reward directly. When that failed, Nim's only alternative was to sign. Anticipating his signing, Nim's teachers unwittingly made one or more appropriate signs, about a quarter of a second before he signed. Terrace also showed that prompting explained the signing of other chimpanzees who were trained to use ASL.
Because chimpanzees only signed to obtain rewards, their signing was, by definition, limited to the imperative function of words. That differs fundamentally from its declarative function, which is to name objects conversationally. Imperatives are a minuscule portion of human vocabulary. If human communication were limited to imperatives, language would have never evolved. Initially, Terrace hoped that combinations of a chimpanzee's signs would provide evidence that it could create a sentence. What Project Nim showed, however, is that a chimpanzee cannot even use signs declaratively. Until a chimpanzee can learn words, he concluded that it's pointless to ask if it can create a sentence.
The negative results of Project Nim posed two questions: why can a chimpanzee not learn language, words in particular, and which of our ancestors was the first species to use words? To answer the first question, Terrace cited recent discoveries by developmental psychologists who showed that infants experience two non-verbal relations with their caretakers, intersubjectivity and joint attention, before they learn to name objects. He argued that the absence of those precursors in chimpanzees is the best explanation for their failure to learn words.
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