-
OVERVIEW
-
- No investigation in Kellogg's career brought him more
attention than did the study involving the rearing of his
infant son Donald with an infant chimpanzee, Gua. The
study is well documented in the 336 pages that comprise
The Ape and the Child. (B&B p. 465)
-
- RATIONALE:
- The idea for the study emerged in 1927 when
Kellogg was still a graduate student at Columbia
University. Kellogg and Kellogg (1933) give us that
date for the idea but not its source. However, our
guess is that it was stimulated by an article on the
"wolf children" of India which was published that year
in the American Journal of Psychology (Squires, 1927).
Similar to Itard's "wild boy of Aveyron," the wolf
children were two young girls found in a cave
inhabited by wolves. These children behaved as though
they were wolves, eating and drinking like those
animals and making no use of their hands except to
crawl around on all fours, which was their method of
locomotion. Eventually the girls learned to walk
upright, although they could never run. One acquired
speech, at least a vocabulary of approximately 100
words, but the other continued only to make grunting
noises. Howling noises at night were never
extinguished, nor were their human teachers able to
break them of the rather distasteful habit of
"pouncing upon and devouring small birds and mammals"
(Kellogg,1931b, p. 162). Both girls died at an early
age. Like other feral children, the wolf children were
judged to be sub-normal in intelligence and it was
assumed that their intellectual deficits prevented
them from being able to adapt to their new
surroundings. This interpretation was common in
explaining the problems of adjustment in feral
children and was, in fact, the explanation offered by
Squires (1927). Kellogg disagreed with that
interpretation, and in two replies published in the
American Journal of Psychology (1931c, 1934), he
argued that the wolf children, and others like them,
were probably born of normal intelligence. Indeed, it
was unlikely that they would otherwise have been
capable of survival. From his environmentalistic
perspective he contended that these children learned
to be wild animals because that was exactly what their
environment demanded of them. He believed in the
strong impact of early experience and the existence of
critical periods in development, and he maintained
that the problem with civilizing feral children was
the difficulty of overturning the habits learned early
in life. (B&B, p. 466)
- THE PROJECT:
One way to test this hypothesis would be to place a
human infant of normal intelligence in an uncivilized
environment and to observe systematically its
'development' in that environment. Kellogg noted that
while such an experiment would be both morally outrageous
and illegal, there was another way, albeit somewhat
indirect, to test the environment-heredity question. That
was to take a wild animal and place it in the civilized
environment of a human home (Kellogg & Kellogg,
1933). Thus began the attempt to produce this unusual
experiment. (B&B p. 466)
Kellogg wanted to use an experimental subject that was
very young before the animal could acquire a repertoire
of infrahuman modes of responding. He wanted a situation
that would assure that the animal was always treated as a
human and never as an animal, particularly a pet. That
is, it was not to be fed from a dish on the floor or
scratched behind its ears Interaction's with the animal
were to be full-time.( B&B p. 467)
The plan for Kellogg's experiment was outlined in a
Psychological Review (1931b) article in which he
wrote:
- Suppose an anthropoid were taken into a typical
human family at the day of birth and reared as a
child. Suppose he were fed upon a bottle, clothed,
washed, bathed, fondled, and given a
characteristically human environment; that he were
spoken to like the human infant from the moment of
parturition; that he had an adopted human mother and
an adopted human father . . . . The experimental
situation par excellence should indeed be attained if
this technique were refined one step farther by
adopting such a baby ape into a human family with one
child of approximately the ape's age.(p.168)
(B&B pgs. 467 - 468)
...Kellogg arranged a leave of absence from Indiana
University, and with a grant secured from the Social
Science Research Council, he, Luella, and infant son
Donald moved to Florida, near the Yale Anthropoid
Experiment Station at Orange Park. Through a special
agreement with Robert Yerkes, they were able to obtain a
young female chimpanzee, Gua. Gua was 7 1/2 months old
when the Kelloggs acquired her. At that time, Donald was
10 months of age. Kellogg regretted the fact that the
chimp was not younger, but given the difficulties of
acquiring young apes, he had little choice. (B&B
p. 468)
For the next nine months, Winthrop and Luella served
as experimenters in a project that demanded 12 hours a
day from the two of them, seven days a week. With a few
exceptions necessary "to meet the indispositions of the
infants or experimenters," the schedule remained
unchanged. Winthrop Kellogg was concerned that the
experiment measure up to his demands. There was nothing
he could do about the age differential between Donald and
Gua, nor about the fact that Qua was not obtained shortly
after her birth. Nevertheless, he would conduct his
experiment as no other prior investigation with apes. He
would maintain identical rearing conditions for his two
experimental subjects. Further, he would use a variety of
tasks to test his infants, not only on a comparative
basis but also in looking at developmental sequences
within each of them. Lastly, he would maintain sufficient
scientific detachment to be able to evaluate objectively
the data he was collecting.
So for nine months, Donald and Gua were tested daily
on such things as blood pressure, memory, body size,
scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization,
locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual
dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play
behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language
comprehension, attention span, and others. (B&B p.
469)
The Ape and the Child is clearly a book about
an ape. It was the chimp who was the primary object of
study; she was the experimental subject while Donald
served as the control subject. This was a study designed
to answer a question that was beyond the scope of other
investigations. ( B&B p. 470)
Back to the Index
|
