Photo: Koko with her caretaker Penny Patterson in the documentary “Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks.” (Ron Cohn/The Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org)
Spoiler alert.
A person in a gorilla suit walks through this video:
The Invisible Gorilla Test is a “selective attention test” designed by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University. They asked subjects to watch this video, after which the subjects were asked if they noticed anything out of the ordinary taking place.
In most of the 16 test groups, about 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla.
I sincerely hope our generally-above-average Daily Post readers were able to notice the gorilla. Since you were told about it in advance.
The basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advertisement designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by ‘inattentional blindness’ in motorists. In the ad, the gorilla was replaced by a moonwalking bear.
Reportedly, no animals were harmed in the making of the “attention test” video, or the British advertisement.
In my opinion, there’s a big difference between noticing a person in a gorilla suit, and a real gorilla. For one thing, a real gorilla can weigh up to 400 pounds. If Simons and Chabris had used a real gorilla in their “selective attention test” video, I bet a lot more of their test subjects would have noticed.
That’s the problem with psychological tests these days. No real gorillas.
Koko was a real gorilla, who grew up in California and learned to use American Sign Language to express about 1,000 concepts. Or so it was claimed.
A doctoral candidate from Stanford University, Penny Patterson, began working with Koko at the San Francisco Zoo when the gorilla was about a year old, as part of an experiment to determine if gorillas could learn sign language. Later, Ms. Patterson raised enough in donations to eventually move Koko to a mobile home in Woodside, even though the Zoo had originally planned to use Koko for breeding purposes.
Koko appeared on the cover of two different issues of National Geographic, in 1978 and 1985, which I believe is more appearances than almost any human has managed.
She passed away in her sleep, in 2018, at the ripe old age of 47. She never had children, although Ms. Patterson and her non-profit Gorilla Foundation provided her with two successive male gorillas, named Michael and Ndume. Koko didn’t hit it off with either of them, except as “friends”. Maybe she wanted a husband she could hold a real conversation with.
Preparing for this column, I watched a few videos about Koko, and it seemed pretty clear to me that she could express herself with sign language. But that wasn’t enough for Ms. Patterson’s critics. They wanted proof that Koko could speak in full sentences.
In my opinion, based on those videos, Koko was doing what some of us call “The Weave”.
It’s brilliant.
“You know, I do the Weave. You know what the Weave is? I’ll talk about, like nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like… And friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ But the Fake News, you know what they say? He rambled…
“That’s not rambling. When you have… what you do is… you get off a subject… mention another little tidbit… then you get back onto the subject… and you go through this and you do it for two hours. And you don’t even mispronounce one word. And they say, he had 100,000 people… you know, in New Jersey, we had 107,000 people. They never like to report it, so I say it… But in Wildwood, New Jersey, they announced 107,000 people…”
And they didn’t miss the gorilla.