Winthrop Niles Kellogg (April 13, 1898 – June 22, 1972) was an American comparative psychologist who studied the behavior of a number of intelligent animal species.
For two years he served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces in the US Army Air Service, earning him the prestigious Croix de Guerre.
With help from colleagues and students, he established an extensive program to study the physiological and conditional responses of dogs with their cerebral cortex removed.
At Indiana University, Kellogg was involved in a very diverse set of research topics, which stemmed in part from student interest.
[1] In the lab, Kellogg questioned whether dogs' transected spinal cords could exhibit a conditioned response "below the point of transsection".
Kellogg and his students could not produce any type of spinal conditioning and concluded that the twitch observed by Shurrager and Culler was just: "a basic response to a conditioned electric shock stimulus applied to another part of the body (either to another limb or to the tail) and that an unconditioned electric shock stimulus applied to the limb in question was unnecessary.
[2] He conducted studies on a number of other topics: "fear in rats, mice, and birds (1931a), advertising (1932a), emotion as it affects muscular steadiness (1932b), fetal activity (1941), and a learning curve for flying an airplane (1946)".
[1]: 462 Of all his work at Indiana, none would bring him as much attention as his comparative study involving an infant chimpanzee named Gua.
Soon after arriving at Indiana, Kellogg began to plan an ambitious project concerning the comparative psychology of primates.
Kellogg received the Social Science Research Council fellowship to work at the Yale Anthropoid Station in Florida in order to prepare for the project in 1931.
To his surprise, soon after arriving Kellogg learned that another post-doctoral fellow Carlyle Jacobsen had been studying an infant ape since its birth a year prior.
[2] Shortly after arriving, and earlier than expected, a 7.5-month-old female infant chimpanzee joined the Kellogg family; her name was Gua.
Donald (10 months old) and Gua were treated as equally "as possible, being dressed, bathed, fed, and taught in a similar manner".
For nine months straight Kellogg maintained identical rearing conditions for Donald and Gua and would use tasks to test the infants comparatively and developmentally.
"[6]A portion of the results was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, and Kellogg began writing a book with Luella.
Some stated the project was inhumane while others pointed out the undesirability of using an infant as an experimental subject for an extended period of time.
[1] Kellogg's study later inspired novelist Karen Joy Fowler to write We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a fictional account of a similar experiment also set at Indiana University.
I knew that bats had sonar, and so did he...Kellogg decided by gosh he was going to find out, so he started working on the porpoise problem.
"[8] Two of the main questions with regard to bottle-nose navigation were whether bottlenose dolphins produce sounds serving as sonar signals and whether they decode the echoes bouncing back.
With typical Kellogg scientific rigor, he conducted additional experiments to support this conclusion and to rule out "possible involvement of other sense modalities".
While continuing to test Paddy, Kellogg and his colleague Rice found a difference in her responding when presenting a stimulus in the air versus in the water.
When there is the slightest ripple in the water, the angle of entry of the refracted light rays is so garbled as to prevent any clear image of objects in the air ...
One of Kellogg's doctoral students Ronald Schusterman remembered him "fussing and fuming and berating himself for not doing this when he and Chuck started the experiment with Paddy".
[5]: 94 "Kellogg readily admitted his scientific mistakes and corrected them by often acquiring, in a firsthand-way, an understanding of why an animal behaved as it did.
[8] In 1963, Kellogg officially retired from Florida State, although he would return to that campus on several occasions in temporary faculty positions.
The more I got to know Kellogg, the more I tried to emulate his behavior, hoping to acquire the same self-confidence and flair that he exhibited, particularly when dealing with things of a scientific nature.
He spurned the value of theory because he felt it placed blinders on the scientist causing important findings to go unnoticed or at least to be misinterpreted.
"[1]: 463 "He was a comparative psychologist and a student of animal behavior",[1]: 477 as is clear from his research with Gua and Donald and his study of dolphin echolocation.
As a comparative and experimental psychologist Kellogg was, and still is, recognized as an empirical scientist who conducted highly controlled thorough experiments with the technical innovation to create and improve laboratory equipment and methods.
Today, his comparative work stands as most significant and long-lasting in the world of animal behavior because of the implications brought forth by his ape-child and bottlenose studies.