Items13The creator’s order
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Clever HansThe horse that made observer bias famous. Hans tapped his hoof until he seemed to have answered a question, but Oskar Pfungst found his accuracy depended on seeing a person who knew the answer. Tiny changes in the questioner's posture told him when to stop. The case changed how researchers guard…0 - 2
David GreybeardIn 1960 at Gombe, Jane Goodall saw David Greybeard use plant material to fish termites from a mound. She also observed him and another chimpanzee, Goliath, making tools for the job. Field observations like these gave scientists direct evidence that wild chimpanzees shape tools for a purpose.0 - 3
Betty the CrowAt Oxford, Betty bent a straight piece of wire and used it to lift a small bucket from a tube. The feat looked like an invention made on the spot. Later field research found wild New Caledonian crows also bend tool material, making Betty's achievement a case of using a species-typical behavior on…0 - 4
Alex (parrot)Irene Pepperberg showed Alex pairs of objects and asked what was the same or what was different. He could name the relevant category, such as color, shape, or material, and could answer with a word for absence when no feature matched. That made his vocal labels a way to test what he understood…0 - 5
Chaser (dog)After three years of work with John Pilley, Chaser could identify 1,022 objects by name. In further tests, she responded correctly when familiar object names were paired with different commands. The study measured two kinds of learning separately. One was recognizing the object a word named. The…0 - 6
Washoe (chimpanzee)In 1969, Allen and Beatrix Gardner reported that Washoe could use manual signs in everyday interactions. Her case helped shift ape communication research toward a visual form that a chimpanzee could produce. The harder question was how much her signs showed about grammar and which parts of an…0 - 7
Nim ChimpskyNim learned to make manual signs. When Herbert Terrace and his colleagues looked closely at films of the exchanges, they found that many of Nim's combinations followed a trainer's prompt or repeated a trainer's signs. They concluded the combinations gave little evidence of sentence structure,…0 - 8
KanziKanzi began using a board of graphic symbols while researchers were working with his mother, Matata. The researchers reported that he acquired some of the symbols through exposure rather than individual training. His case made how an ape learns a communication system a question worth studying…0 - 9
Happy the ElephantAt the Bronx Zoo, Happy used a large mirror to inspect a visible mark above her eye and repeatedly touched it with her trunk. She was the only one of the three elephants in the 2006 paper to do so. Her response gave researchers evidence that an Asian elephant could use its reflection to investigate…0 - 10
Dolly (sheep)Dolly was the first mammal cloned from a cell taken from an adult. It was a surprise because the donor cell had already specialized, yet its genetic information still supported development of an entire animal. The sheep on display at National Museums Scotland is Dolly's preserved specimen.0
