Winthrop Niles Kellogg (April 13, 1898 – June 22, 1972) was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species.
Early life
Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in 1898 in Mount Vernon, New York. He began undergraduate study in 1916 at Cornell University for one year before joining the Great War (World War I) in Europe. For two years he served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces in the US Army Air Service, earning him the prestigious Croix de Guerre. After the war, he returned to undergraduate study at Indiana University Bloomington. There he met Luella Dorothy Agger of Indianapolis, whom he would marry in 1920.
Kellogg graduated from Indiana in 1922 majoring in philosophy and psychology. Kellogg tried out several jobs, including a journalist, but was persuaded by Luella's uncle to have a go in academia. Kellogg followed this advice enrolling in the psychology program at Columbia University, where he would receive his Master's in 1927 and his doctorate just two years later in 1929. His doctorate was directed by Robert S. Woodworth and compared psychophysical methods. Even as a graduate student, Kellogg was a prolific researcher. He published four single-authored articles and one co-authored in 1928–29 in addition to his dissertation. He published an additional three articles in 1930 and another five in 1931. Kellogg sustained this level of activity throughout his academic career. This level of productivity likely aided in his hiring offer by Indiana soon after receiving his PhD.Hearst, E., & Capshew, J.H. (Eds.). (1988). Psychology at Indiana University: A centennial review and compendium. Indiana University Department of Psychology: Indiana.
Indiana University At Indiana University Bloomington, Kellogg built a research laboratory for studying conditioned behavior in dogs. With help from colleagues and students, he established an extensive program to study the physiological and conditional responses of dogs with their cerebral cortex removed. The laboratory provided a great opportunity for students to get adequate training in experimental research and to work on specific research questions within a "well-defined research paradigm."
Kellogg was an innovative and creative spirit. He had a knack for designing new equipment, improving old equipment, creating new modes of data collection, and developing new surgical techniques". Among his publications, some concern these sorts of developments and technological innovation.
At Indiana University, Kellogg was involved in a very diverse set of research topics, which stemmed in part from student interest. Though he was involved in a great variety of topics, his research on conditioning and learning resulted in approximately 50 publications. Some of the topics within conditioning and learning that he pursued included "the bilateral transfer of conditioning...the effects of various drugs on learning...and spinal conditioning".
Kellogg was an atheorist and used his conditioning studies to show that four different theories of learning: "trial-and-error learning, Gestalt insight, conditioning, and sign learning" Kellogg, W.N. (1938). An eclectic view of some theories of learning. Psychological Review, 45, pages 165-184. were no different, and instead they were highlighting only parts of the whole situation of learning and argued that learning be defined as a function – a change in behavior – and not a structure – a change in the nervous system.
Spinal conditioning
In the lab, Kellogg questioned whether dogs' transected spinal cords could exhibit a conditioned response "below the point of transsection". What he was looking for was a muscle twitch as the conditioned response in one of the exposed hamstring muscles. The twitch had been previously observed by Shurrager and Culler in 1940. Kellogg and his students could not produce any type of spinal conditioning and concluded that the twitch observed by Shurrager and Culler was just: "a basic response to a conditioned electric shock stimulus applied to another part of the body (either to another limb or to the tail) and that an unconditioned electric shock stimulus applied to the limb in question was unnecessary. It was argued further that changes in this muscle twitch with training should be regarded simply as sensitization of a reflex".
Other work
Being the comparative psychologist he was, he conducted what is believed to be the "first experimental study of learning by snakes". In 1936 he published "A Description of Maze Learning by Water Snakes…".
He conducted studies on a number of other topics: "fear in rats, mice, and birds (1931a), advertising (1932a), emotion as it affects muscular steadiness (1932b), fetal activity (1941), and a learning curve for flying an airplane (1946)".
Of all his work at Indiana, none would bring him as much attention as his comparative study involving an infant chimpanzee named Gua.
The Ape and the Child
Soon after arriving at Indiana, Kellogg began to plan an ambitious project concerning the comparative psychology of primates. No other investigation in his career would bring him quite as much attention as this project would. In the article "Humanizing the Ape",Kellogg, W. N. (1931). "Humanizing the ape". Psychological Review, 38(2), page 160. he argued for the necessity of comparative developmental studies of humans and non-human primates. Kellogg was interested in determining the "relative influence of nature and nurture on behavior". In the article, Kellogg proposed to raise an infant chimpanzee with his own infant son Donald.
Kellogg generated this idea during his graduate time at Columbia and it is supposed that the idea was sparked by an article on the "wolf children" of India. Kellogg argued these children, and those like them, were born with normal intelligence as it would be unlikely that they would have survived. He asserted that the children learned to live like wolves because that was "what their environment demanded of them". Kellogg "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". Placing a "human infant of normal intelligence in an uncivilized environment and [observing…] its development in that environment" would be both unethical and not legal. The only other way to test this question of environment versus heredity would be to take a "wild animal and place it in the civilized environment of a human home". There had been earlier attempts to get at this question concerning civilized apes, but none met the strict criteria Kellogg thought necessary, especially the criterion of a "situation that would assure that the animal was always treated as a human and never as an animal, particularly a pet".
It would be Robert Yerkes who would help Kellogg with his plan. Kellogg received the Social Science Research Council fellowship to work at the Yale Anthropoid Station in Florida in order to prepare for the project in 1931. That summer the Kellogg family moved to Florida. To his surprise, soon after arriving Kellogg learned that another post-doctoral fellow Carlyle Jacobsen had been studying an infant ape since its birth a year prior. To Kellogg's benefit, there had been no clear attempt to "humanize the ape".
Shortly after arriving, and earlier than expected, a 7.5-month-old female infant chimpanzee joined the Kellogg family; her name was Gua. Donald (10 months old) and Gua were treated as equally "as possible, being dressed, bathed, fed, and taught in a similar manner". Kellogg conducted a number of tests to measure their development as regularly as possible. As one might expect, Gua grew faster than Donald and even learned some behaviors more quickly. Gua seemed more dependent on human interaction and support than Donald.
Though Gua progressed quite impressively in acquiring everyday human behaviors, she did not meet Kellogg's expectations, with the reason being that she made no effort to communicate via human language. After nine months of work, the study ended in the spring of 1932. This was four years and three months short of his initial five-year plan. Gua stayed in Florida while the Kelloggs returned to Indiana.
This experiment would prove to be one of his most pioneering studies. For nine months straight Kellogg maintained identical rearing conditions for Donald and Gua and would use tasks to test the infants comparatively and developmentally.
Though the very heart of the project "was an attempt to discover how human a chimpanzee could become when reared in a human environment". Kellogg had formulated it to be the definitive investigation explaining the interaction between heredity and environment. The study proved to demonstrate the limits of heredity regardless of environment, in addition to developmental gains induced by enriched environments. As stated earlier, Gua never met Kellogg's expectation of human language as she was never able to imitate human vocalizations. Contrastingly, the same could not be said for Donald as he imitated a few of Gua's vocalizations, including the food bark when food was presented or nearby.Schusterman, R.J. (2010). Historical Perspectives. Aquatic Mammals, 36(1), pages 84-110.
"Gua, treated as an human child, behaved like a human child except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her. This being shown, the experiment was discontinued."Babe & Ape. (1933). Time, 21(25), page 50.
A portion of the results was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, and Kellogg began writing a book with Luella. The Ape and the Child was published in 1933. It documents the study very well.
The book was written in a way that would appeal to the general public and so it is no surprise that news media, such as The New York Times and the Science News Letter, soon published articles about the project. However, it should be reminded that although Kellogg had assessed the development of language and had expectations for Gua, the project goal was not about teaching human language to an ape and only part of one chapter in The Ape and the Child deals with such.
Despite Kellogg's enthusiasm for the psychological, anthropological, and biological significance of the study, it was not free from criticism. Criticisms came from colleagues, the public, and even Luella. Some stated the project was inhumane while others pointed out the undesirability of using an infant as an experimental subject for an extended period of time. Others disapproved of the separation of Gua from her mother and other chimpanzees. Additionally, since the study had been written in public friendly way and picked up by media, some critics characterized the study as one seeking publicity and excitement.
Kellogg's study later inspired novelist Karen Joy Fowler to write We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a fictional account of a similar experiment also set at Indiana University. The book was published in 2013.
Florida State University