Coe earns Chancellor's award It's sunny and 62 degrees Farenheit. Perfect weather for sunbathing in Wisconsin. Several students are basking on the steps outside the UW-Madison Psychology building on this Tuesday in mid-April. It snowed seven inches just a few days before, so you'd think everyone would want to be out enjoying the first warm weather of the month.
Yet, inside, Rm. 105 is filled, as Christopher Coe, Ph.D., begins his 1 p.m. lecture to about 350 students enrolled in "Animal Behavior: the Primates." The day's topic is "Learning and Cognition." Also on the syllabus are lectures ranging from taxonomy and conservation to animal welfare and AIDS.
Coe, professor of psychology and WRPRC Psychobiology Research Group chair, incorporates his knowledge of behavior, neuroscience, and comparative and health psychology into his research and teaching. He also instructs courses on stress and coping and biological psychology, and he mentors students doing research. His university service includes chairing the College of Letters and Sciences Animal Care and Use Committee, which reviews animal research protocols in terms of ethical concerns and humane procedures. He is involved with several graduate school committees and research centers, such as the Waisman Center and the Institute on Aging.
Coe's 11 dynamic years of teaching at UW-Madison, combined with his research and service contributions, led Professor H. Hill Goldsmith, Department of Psychology chair, to nominate him for a Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award. Coe, in addition to nine others, accepted the distinguished honor April 29 at the Elvehjem Museum of Art.
Coe "is an extraordinarily effective communicator of psychological, biological and medical concepts to both the science and nonscience major," Goldsmith wrote. He described Coe's expansion of the Harlow Primate Laboratory to provide more opportunities for students and commended his qualities of compassion and friendship. His accolades even included a description of Coe's flawless imitations of many monkey and ape calls: "It is not unusual to hear his own chimpanzee pant-hoots emanating from the classroom. Indeed, he encourages the students to master animal calls as well."
The day's lecture begins with a discussion on early behavior and child rearing. Coe asks his students to ponder how much of natural monkey mothering we should incorporate into our own parenting behavior: "How much can we deviate from the natural behavior observed in nonhuman primates before we no longer think it's a good idea for our own species? ...I don't think most of us would want to carry our baby on us for six to 12 months, but then, do we think it's a good idea to have them sleeping down the hall? Do we want them in our beds, or is that idea too weird for American culture?" In most large lecture halls, questions such as these don't always get immediate responses. But in Coe's class, several students pipe up with answers, viewpoints and additional queries. The lecture becomes a discussion. Coe is animated, gesturing and responsive. Note-takers can appreciate his articulate, complete sentences and relevant anecdotes that bring the material to life.
The interactive lecture moves back in time to discuss Ockham, Romanes, and Thorndike and how animals learn. Coe asks, what is considered "reasoning" and what is simply chance, or trial and error, in learning? Out come the props. He holds up a wooden circle and a square and tells how a young assistant UW professor in 1932 became interested in assessing intelligence in nonhuman primates. His techniques, discrimination learning and "learning to learn" from previous trials, would become the standard for assessing animal intelligence. "Professor Harry Harlow put a raisin behind a circle or a square, then discovered that monkeys can quickly learn to discriminate objects by color, shape or brightness, that they can master 'oddity' learning, or correctly choosing which object is not like the others 80 percent to 100 percent of the time by the second trial."
"To this day," Coe adds, "Harlow's learning set tasks are still the best ever developed to discriminate a less smart animal from a more intelligent one. This was the key to studying the higher functioning of the primate brain."
His students write vigorously as he elaborates: "Prosimians cannot do the learning set. New World monkeys are 'iffy.' Capuchins can do it, rhesus monkeys can do it, chimps and the rest of us I would hope can get the raisin most of the time; gibbons are a disaster...and squirrel monkeys are really dumb on these tasks; your average raccoon can do far better."
But then, taking a different tack and standing up for the squirrel monkey and the gibbon, Coe adds, "Maybe gibbons were never intended to do these manipulative tasks, to reach for objects and choose shapes with different colors. Maybe they were better adapted for swinging through trees. Perhaps we should measure their intelligence in other ways."
The class nears its end. Papers shuffle. As riveting as the lecture was, it's still Wisconsin. It's still April. It's still pushing into the mid '60s outside. Nevertheless, several students linger to talk to their professor afterwards. Coe is in no hurry to leave. He is as enthusiastic talking to, listening to, and learning from a group of two or three as with a group of 350.
Copyright 1997. Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center.