WASHINGTON — Dan the baboon sits in front of a computer screen. The letters BRRU pop up. With a quick and almost dismissive tap, the monkey signals it’s not a word. Correct. Next comes ITCS. Again, not a word. Finally KITE comes up.
He pauses and hits a green oval to show it’s a word. In the space of just a few seconds, Dan has demonstrated a mastery of what some experts say is a form of pre-reading and is rewarded with a treat.
Dan, 4, is part of new research that shows baboons are able to pick up the first step in reading — identifying recurring patterns and determining which four-letter combinations are words and which aren’t.
The study shows that reading’s early steps are far more instinctive than scientists first thought, and it also indicates that non-human primates may be smarter than we think.
“They’ve got the hang of this thing,” said Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and lead author of the research.
Baboons and other monkeys are good pattern finders, and what they are doing may be what we first do in recognizing words. It’s still a far cry from real reading. They don’t understand what these words mean and are just breaking them into parts, Grainger said.
In 300,000 tests, the six baboons distinguished between real and fake words about three-fourths of the time, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
