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- [Presenter] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large-brained,
long the master of fire, tools, and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable, yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly. We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future
from our shared understanding of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
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- Today, I'm gonna be talking with you
about symbolic play.
And I'm very grateful to the illustrator, Barry Blitt,
for doing a February cover
for "The New Yorker" called, "Origin Story."
And we'll come back to this later in this presentation.
Before I get to the substance of the presentation,
I want to acknowledge some colleagues, and also thanks.
So, talking with Anne Russon
and Dick Byrne via email helped a lot.
I relied on reading and rereading Alison Jolly,
and I really am grateful to Rich Wargo
with technical support.
The presentation is to introduce you to play,
and remind you what you know about play,
but more importantly, how we define symbolic play.
Also, remind us that sometimes people describe homo sapiens
as the playful species of homo.
And so, briefly, I'll talk about how play characterizes
and is sort of universally attributed to our species.
And then the bulk of the presentation
will be looking at evidence for symbolic play in great apes.
If you go to the dictionary, play has lots of definitions,
either as a verb or as a noun, but this first definition
is one that you frequently encounter.
And the thing you might notice
is that it's focusing on activity
that is viewed as not serious or practical.
But if you're an evolutionary biologist,
a developmental psychologist,
I think you recognize that play is essential
for cognitive, social, and linguistic development.
And the payoff is huge.
I think that it yields an individual
that is far more behaviorally flexible.
If we start looking at the functions of play,
we can see that lots of folks say,
"Well, play is about practice."
Well, yeah, you can learn to be agile.
You can figure out what your reproductive repertoire is.
You can also maybe get a crack at taking care of an infant.
And, equally important,
you can start exploring the world through objects.
Play can also create a context
in which you can experience extremes
without the kind of pressure of a real threat to you.
And maybe it also functions as a kind of psychological
or cognitive rheostat, in terms of your responsivity.
I would also argue that it is going to scaffold
so many of the behaviors, and the behavioral challenges,
that an organism will encounter later on in its life.
It also allows you to continue to learn.
Individuals who play a lot
have a long juvenile developmental period.
And those are also the big-brained animals,
bigger brains for their given body size.
When we're looking for how to recognize play,
often we can see this wonderful open-mouth play face,
but it doesn't always have to be there.
And you can see this play face
in either a social or solitary context.
Often, play is about exaggerating,
whether it's a body movement, or a psychological process.
Many times, when we see an organism basically engaging
in a kind of cyclical or repetitive pattern,
and coupling it with one or both of these,
we can often say, "Oh, that organism is playing."
And then this idea of restraint.
When particularly social, an individual may be doing
what we call self-handicapping.
Obviously, you could say it's a rough-and-tumble play bout,
and it looks like play biting,
but in fact, the skin is not being broken.
And you can also calibrate your body size
versus your conspecific.
Going back to foundational scholars,
Wolfgang Kohler and Gregory Bateson.
I think it's useful to pay attention
to Kohler's idea of serious play.
And this young man is showing us
exactly what he had in mind.
These are very deliberate movements.
Sometimes you'll see this compressed mouth,
sometimes the protruding lower lip.
And Bateson, Gregory Bateson,
tried to think about play, and individuals engaging in play,
as framing reality as separate,
basically, their game in their play behavior,
as out of reality,
or from the sort of real-time experience.
So, what is symbolic play?
Well, this young man is showing us precisely
that this apple is clearly a telephone.
And we look for definitions of symbolic play
from developmental psychologists,
and we watch children use objects, actions, or ideas,
and, in many cases, we label it either symbolic play,
or imaginative, or pretend play.
And this pretend object play
is something that I think will come to our attention
when we start looking at the great ape evidence.
Now, coming to our own species,
and I can't spend much time on this,
but I want to just remind you, as I said earlier,
we're sometimes characterized
as the playful species of hominid.
A Dutch historian, in fact, wrote a book
called, "Homo Ludens," in which he makes the case
that play is critical and/or foundational to human culture.
More recently, we can look
to the human relations area files,
which is now an e-database.
We're fundamentally looking across cultures
for how anthropologists record various kinds of data.
And in this enterprise, games and sports and the like,
are cultural universals.
Lastly, Donald Brown, a member of CARTA,
wrote a lovely book in 1991 called, "Cultural Universals."
And, along with many other patterns,
he points out the ubiquity of play
in all cultures in the ethnographic record.
So let's get to the evidence for symbolic play,
if it is there, in great apes,
and point to some examples.
Gonna be talking about orangs, gorillas, and Pan.
The bulk of the data will come from Pan.
The information is ranging over seven-plus decades,
and it sometimes is a single account.
In some cases, it's a more empirical kind of report.
The subjects that I'll talk about
are often apes that are in ape language projects,
but I'll also be referring to some apes that are wild.
And when I do the wild material,
it will be restricted to genus Pan.
So, a single slide for Pongo.
And, in this case, an individual named Chantek,
who was one of those early pioneers
in American Sign Language acquisition,
worked with an anthropologist,
and just a very, I think, nice but informative anecdote.
Chantek would use his sign for cat
in American Sign Language.
Apparently he was afraid of them.
And he would use it, and basically signed cats were nearby,
but people knew that cats were not present.
And then he would also feign fear.
Gorilla. This is the famous Koko and Penny Patterson.
Again, long-lasting relationship,
decades of work in acquiring American Sign Language.
And when you look at how Koko uses the language
when she's not interacting with Penny,
she can sign to herself, she can sign to her dolls.
I like this anecdote about alligators,
because, again, it sort of shows a symbolic play,
where Koko is afraid of alligators,
even though she's never seen one.
But she has these little toy alligators,
and she sneaks up on her human friends.
This is all kind of pretend, right, to frighten them.
And the reaction of the friend
is supposed to be startled and fearful.
Going on to genus Pan.
And we'll start with a kind of foundational study
in American Sign Language.
And this is the very famous chimpanzee, Washoe,
and her son, Loulis, her adopted son.
And this is them later in life.
Remember that Washoe and a set of other chimpanzees
learned American Sign Language in a number of contexts.
But in this case, we're looking for how she either engaged
in symbolic play with toys, bathing her dolls,
or using American Sign Language to talk.
Talk to her dolls and/or communicate with stuffed animals.
Another of her companions, Dar,
would play stuffed animals on his side,
and use the sign for tickle.
Now, this is an extended two-slide account
of what I'm describing as the mother of all anecdotes,
in part because it's really a case history.
And it's about Vicki and her mother,
her human mother, Cathy Hayes.
And Vicki was one of those early pioneers
in trying to teach chimpanzees vocal language.
It was a failure.
Vicki eventually got maybe four words,
including the word mama, however it is she produced it.
But this extended anecdote really has to do
with Vicki's imaginary pull-toy.
And, in sum, basically, Vicki creates an imaginary pull-toy,
trailing her arm out behind her with a string,
and uses this imaginary pull-toy repetitively.
Sometimes she modifies the game
so the rope that's pulling the toy
gets caught on some plumbing pipes,
and then she has to do all of these adjustments
to get it free.
Or she sits on the toilet
and plays with her imaginary toy,
which is at the end of the rope.
The thing that certainly gets people's attention
is what follows, is where Vicki continues this behavior,
gets her toy caught up again, but then gets frustrated,
is sitting on the floor, quote,
as if she's holding a taught cord,
and then looks up to her mother,
and uses her vocal behavior,
and basically makes a request.
And her mother untangles, using a pantomime,
untangles the rope, and gives it back to Vicki.
And Vicki carries off with her toy.
Shortly thereafter, Cathy Hayes decides she'll join in
and invent her own pull-toy,
with a very interesting consequence.
Vicki basically fixates
at where the toy and the rope should be on the floor,
and then vocalizes in fear, jumps into her mother's arms,
and never plays this game again.
Moving on to apes in the field,
and, in this case, as I said, chimpanzees.
This is a relatively recent study
from the Kanyawara Community in Uganda,
where we're seeing juvenile chimpanzees,
males and females, carrying sticks.
They're also carrying rocks, it turns out.
But there is a female bias
in who's carrying these objects.
And there is a video clip on the next slide.
We will not be able to see it today,
but in case you want to chase it down,
because it's a pretty compelling interview
with Richard Wrangham.
But the chimpanzees are carrying rocks or sticks
for periods of time, minutes, hours.
They carry them up into trees. They put them in day nests.
They make nests for the objects.
And the interpretation is that this is either doll play
or a form of play-mothering.
The behavior stops after females give birth.
And so far, this is the only community
where this pattern of behavior has been observed.
Another field chimpanzee site, in far-west Africa,
the hottest, driest, most open habitat,
involves chimpanzees exploiting shallow pools
when the temperature is extremely high,
and as is the humidity.
But in addition to basically having pool parties,
they often use these pools of water to explore themselves,
and use sort of this reflective pool, I think,
to kind of investigate themselves.
These are climatological data,
just to show indeed how hot it is.
The final field study I want to talk about is about bonobos.
And this is the site of Wamba.
It's directed by Takeshi Furuichi
from the University of Kyoto.
These are habituated bonobos.
And the researcher who's been working there,
or who did work there for almost three years,
is Isabel Behncke.
She's here at a bonobo sanctuary.
And her focus of attention
was looking at the role of play in bonobo society.
But here, I want to focus on how bonobos use water.
So, when they have, when they're near water,
whether it's running or still,
they can do social play in or around water,
or they can do solitary play.
And Behncke observes both adults
and immatures engaging in this.
And this particular quote,
if the chimpanzee is around still water, quote,
they look at their reflection on the surface,
sometimes stroking the water slightly,
as if to observe the resulting ripples.
And what I'm hoping we're gonna be able to show you
is a short clip from this field site,
so you can get a sense of what they do
when they're at the water's edge.
So, I hope you have a sense of how,
at least this bonobo is responding
to the opportunity to interact with water.
And, in your mind's eye, imagine what you would think
if a child did the same.
So, let me just make a few conclusions,
and remind us that, I think I've shown,
there is some evidence of symbolic play in great apes.
The individuals who have shown these kinds of behavior
fall into two groups.
There are captive apes,
most of whom were in ape language acquisition projects.
And the kind of symbolic play
that they engage in is pretense play,
often with people who are emotionally important to them.
And they also use American Sign Language,
and incorporate it into pretense play.
When we turn to the wild apes, two things emerge.
We can say that, at least chimpanzees,
are using object play, pretend object play,
with inanimate objects to show
what I'm gonna describe as mock-parental behavior.
And lastly, perhaps wild apes show symbolic behavior
when they're exploring water.
But before I conclude, I want to show two more slides.
And this sort of brings us back to the introduction.
"The New Yorker" magazine
was first published in February 1925,
and this image became its iconic go-to.
And he's an individual described as Eustace Tilley.
And he's quite a fop.
He's got a monocle, and he's watching a butterfly,
and he's got a top hat.
And then Barry Blitt,
for this year's anniversary issue, does this.
But in fact, what he does is something so compelling.
And what I think this is, is a beautiful example
of how the arts and the humanities can show us an example
of symbolic play in our own species.
And with that, I will thank you very much,
and wait for questions.
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