Computer Screen Brings Chimps Alive in the Lab : Technology: USC software reproduces Jane Goodall’s extensive field studies to enhance behavioral research.
Jane Goodall, the pioneering primate scholar, sat in Room 158 of USC’s social science building the other day and trained her eyes on a young chimpanzee. It was acting strangely, peering into a pool of water and poking it with a stick.
Suddenly, the chimp froze. For four minutes, as Goodall and a team of USC anthropologists discussed its unusual behavior, the chimp remained perfectly, impossibly still. Had one of the scientists not tapped a computer keyboard, bringing the videotaped chimp back to life, it would never have moved again.
The scientists were looking at a newly created, computerized archive of Goodall’s 32 years of chimpanzee research--one of the most comprehensive records of animal behavior ever compiled. Thanks to a software program developed at USC, Goodall’s hundreds of hours of videotapes, films, field notes, maps and photographs collected in the jungles of Africa will now be accessible to other researchers at the touch of a button.
The archive, dubbed “Virtual Chimps,” is being hailed as a major development--both for the richness of its contents and for how it could revolutionize anthropological research. Some scholars predict that, much as the printing press transformed the dissemination of the written word, software programs such as “Virtual Chimps” may forever change the way behavioral research is conducted.
“It’s the cutting edge, what they’re doing at USC. It transforms the nature of observation and fieldwork,” said Linda Marquardt, who organized a symposium at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, where USC’s software prototype was first displayed. “It’s not a question of whether (other) people are going to pick it up, but of how.”
The genius of the computerized archive, Marquardt and others say, is that it gives researchers easy, instant access to video records that were once prohibitively time-consuming to catalogue and view. Moreover, it allows scholars to compare related video clips--frame by frame, if necessary--to make discoveries.
“We’re talking about making videotape into a serious research tool,” said Gary Seaman, co-director of USC’s Center for Visual Anthropology, which developed the software. “It really hasn’t been feasible before. But now, it’s within our grasp.”
Here is how it works:
A detailed written log is made of each videotape. The log describes each chimp’s behavior using specific keywords that are part of the archive’s ethogram--more or less a glossary of behavioral terms developed by Goodall in the field. Once coded, the video’s contents can be selectively retrieved by typing the keyword that describes what a scholar seeks.
A scholar who wants to study the way chimpanzees use tools, for example, can type “tools” and--within moments--compare behavior from one generation of chimpanzees to the next. A few keystrokes later, the same scholar can read Goodall’s handwritten field notes about the behavior or pore over a map of the area where it occurred.
In short, the archive supplies researchers with an unparalleled selection of visual information. Until now, the prospect of wading through hours of tape to find a telling moment has discouraged many scholars who kept video records from using them. Instead, most behavioral researchers have relied on written records of their observations.
The new archive goes “beyond text,” said Seaman. And because the archive contains visual records not just of isolated incidents, but of context--what came before and after--scientists believe it holds the answers to questions that have not yet been asked.
Someday, for example, if genetic research reveals that ear-twitching holds the key to certain behaviors, scientists will be able to turn on “Virtual Chimps” and study the phenomenon in detail.
“One hundred years from now, when there may be no free-ranging chimps, people will be able to go back over and over and do the kind of fine-grained analysis that this material permits,” said Jane B. Lancaster, an anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico. “This is a treasure that will be mined for generations.”
Already, Christopher Boehm, director of USC’s Jane Goodall Research Center, Seaman and their colleagues are using the archive to learn more about chimpanzee behavior--without ever leaving the USC campus. Furthermore, by analyzing Goodall’s research--the longest study of a single group of primates--they expect to learn more about the evolution of human culture.
“What we have here is the most important comparative base line for human behavior that will ever exist,” said Boehm, who has done fieldwork with Goodall in Tanzania. Using “Virtual Chimps,” he said, is “not like being there. In some ways, it’s better. . . . Someone can (use it) without getting malaria or amoebic dysentery.”
Even the 58-year-old Goodall, who filmed many of the 500 hours of Tanzania footage that form the foundation of the archive, says she learns new things by using it.
The curious chimpanzee that she filmed poking a stick into a pool of water, for example, confounded her at the time. She wondered whether the chimp was fascinated by its own reflection. But before she could investigate, the chimp moved on.
On re-examination of the video, however, Seaman and Goodall noticed what may have prompted the chimp’s behavior: dozens of water bugs, darting around in the pool. After reviewing the tape, they hypothesized that the chimp--accustomed to using a stick to collect tasty insects on land--was trying to use the same tool to gather water bugs from the water.
This was exciting because it implied that chimps could make associative links--if a tool worked in one medium, the chimp appeared to reason, it was worthwhile to try it in another.
“The whole value of capturing this on video is that you can re-look,” said Goodall, who bequeathed her materials to USC when she became an adjunct professor in 1990.
Before “Virtual Chimps,” Goodall said, researchers had to remember too many things at once. It is difficult to make detailed comparisons of different greeting behaviors, for example, while also trying to track expressions of dominance or avoidance.
“It’s very, very hard to go through the years with enough of the questions in your mind to draw conclusions about them all,” she said. The archive, she said, “gives you the fine-tuning that’s necessary.”
Boehm said careful examination of video records has enhanced his understanding of certain chimp behaviors. But you have to be able to find what you’re looking for, he said--a task that “Virtual Chimps” makes easy. He offered the example of Goblin, a male chimp that appeared to attack two females who were skirmishing in a tree top.
On first viewing of the videotaped incident, it appeared that Goblin was joining the fight between the two females. But when Boehm slowed down the footage, he saw a very different scenario.
Goblin charged toward the two fighting females, startling them and throwing both toward the ground. One female caught a branch and headed up the tree. The other grabbed the tree trunk and headed down. Meanwhile, Goblin scooted down the tree and shooed the lower female away--an effort, Boehm concluded, to put distance between two adversaries.
“It turned out he was pursuing a strategy to separate them. He wasn’t trying to help either of them--he was trying to break it up,” said Boehm, who was interested to see that male chimps sometimes act as peacemakers. “I could not have seen that with the naked eye.”
By analyzing another 54-second video clip, Boehm made the startling observation that male chimpanzees engage in a complex group decision-making process when deciding whether to make war on a band of strange chimps.
The footage showed a series of subtle interactions between Goblin and his “patrol” of male chimps, all of whom could hear a group of strangers approaching in the distance. Goblin, the leader, was the dominant male--and yet through eye contact and soft vocalizations, he appeared to seek affirmation from his comrades before choosing a course of action.
“Goblin appeared to be sizing up the situation himself and also sizing up the reactions of two other high-ranking males,” Boehm writes in an upcoming book on cooperation and competition in animals and humans.
Boehm’s conclusion--that chimpanzees sometimes make decisions with some mutual consultation as a politically cohesive group--would never have been possible, he said, if he had merely witnessed the scene and taken notes.
“By rolling the tape four or five dozen times, I could see the nuances,” he said. “Without video, we wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what was happening.”
Video can also be watched by more than one observer at a time--creating a diversity of opinions about incidents that in the past would have been interpreted only by the scientists who witnessed behaviors in the wild.
Video is only as useful as it is accessible, however. As Boehm’s research shows, the medium can go a long way toward clarifying confusing events and guarding against misinterpretations. But if a scholar cannot find the 60-second clip needed because it is buried in hours of irrelevant tape, the video is effectively worthless.
That is why USC’s archive is so exciting, many scholars say. And, they say, it comes at the right time.
“In the field of primatology particularly, comparative behavior is the stage that we are now at,” said Marquardt, of the Chicago Academy of Sciences. “It’s no longer just (a matter of) taking notes and seeing things for the first time. . . . The field is now capable of formulating specific hypotheses. To test them out, researchers . . . need to see apples with apples, oranges with oranges.”
Boehm says that changes in his discipline make the need for accessible video records all the more urgent.
“Fifteen years ago, it was heresy to talk about chimps as if they had minds. Hypothesizing what an animal is thinking--this is a relatively new thing,” he said. “But if we’re going to figure out how chimps solve problems, we have to have more definitive material.”
Now that the technical part of the archive is up and running, Boehm is eager to begin gathering as much material as possible to fill it. If he can raise the necessary funds, he dreams of videotaping chimps around the clock, capturing behaviors throughout the day.
“Most primatologists collect data that’s right around their own research interests. We want to get everything (chimps) do,” said Seaman. “We are looking beyond that to become an archive of the future--a complete record. We want their boring behaviors as well as their exciting ones.”
After all, some researcher in the future may be interested in how chimps breathe or walk. The goal of USC’s archive, its organizers say, is to amass enough data to meet the needs of researchers still unborn.
“So in effect,” said Boehm, “100 years from now--or even 1,000--we will have enough video so someone could do a full year’s research at Gombe (National Park in Tanzania) . . . right here.”
