KoKo the Gorilla and Psychological Learning Theories

KoKo the Gorilla and Psychological Learning Theories

KoKo the Gorilla

A developmental psychologist by training, Francine Patterson has devoted her professional career to studying the behavior of gorillas. She is deeply involved in a multiyear study whose goal is the evaluation of gorillas' ability to communicate thinking and experiences and express emotion. She has written a number of professional papers and popular books about her work with one gorilla in particular, an animal named Koko. In addition, Patterson is deeply involved in efforts to save gorilla habitats in Africa and establish a gorilla refuge on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Born on February 13, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, Francine Patterson is the daughter of Dr. Cecil H. Patterson and Frances Spano Patterson. Her father was a psychology professor and her mother was a nutritionist and homemaker.

After graduating from University High School in Urbana, Illinois, in 1965, Patterson enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana. As an undergraduate, she studied psychology, earning her B.A. in that discipline in 1970. Following her graduation, Patterson enrolled in the graduate school of Stanford University. There in 1972, she began working to teach nonverbal communication to a gorilla named Koko. Her experiments had several purposes: to establish whether gorillas had the intelligence to learn nonverbal sign language, and if so, to evaluate how large a vocabulary they could acquire.

Patterson's work with Koko and Ndume, another gorilla who eventually joined her group, was the main focus of her doctoral work. After earning her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1979, she received permission to care for Koko and another gorilla named Michael and continues her work with them.

In 1976, Patterson established the Gorilla Foundation with Dr. Ronald Cohn and Barbara Hiller. She is now president and research director of the organization. This nonprofit foundation is dedicated to the preservation of gorillas in the wild, which are endangered. The foundation also works to protect other endangered species and to continue research into gorilla intelligence, behavior, and psychobiology. The foundation hosts a website (www.koko.org), publishes books and scientific papers, films and videotapes, and the journal Gorilla. It is also in the process of establishing the Allan G. Sanford Gorilla Preserve in Maui, Hawaii, which is intended to be a place to house and study endangered gorillas.

During her 25 years with Koko and the other gorillas of her study group, Patterson has learned that gorillas are capable of acquiring a fairly extensive vocabulary. She has studied gorilla gestures and interpreted these gestures as a kind of language that gorillas have among themselves. She has also been able to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to several of the gorillas—1,000 words of ASL in Koko's case. Koko can converse in ASL and asks questions in ASL as well. Furthermore, Koko can conduct a "bilingual" conversation by responding in sign to questions asked in English. She has learned to read some printed words and has scored between 85 and 95 on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence ...