Beatrix Tugendhut Gardner

Beatrix Tugendhut Gardner (July 13, 1933 – June 5, 1995) was an Austrian-American zoologist who became well known for the primate research that she conducted in the United States. She taught sign language to Washoe the chimpanzee, who was the first ape to learn American sign language. She lived in Poland during Nazi rule, and moved with her family to a suburb in São Paulo, Brazil, to escape the Nazis in 1939. She and her family remained in Brazil for six years,

At Wellesley, Beatrice met Allen Gardner. They met when they both attended a talk being given by Harry Harlow on his studies of contact comfort in infant rhesus macaque monkeys.

In 1966, the Gardner and her husband acquired a 10-month-old chimpanzee that they named Washoe, Dr. Gardner was successful in teaching Washoe to use 250 different ASL signs, and she was able to use them in novel configurations.

Due to the success of the project, Gardner continued to expand it by obtaining four infant chimpanzees named Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar. Gardner wanted to begin the sign language training from younger than 10 months old, which was Washoe's age when she was first acquired. She also wanted to raise these infant apes alongside each other to determine whether cultural transmission of signing would occur, or whether the apes would use sign language to communicate with one another.

Personal life

Gardner had no children. She died while traveling in Italy with her husband at the age of 61 due to sepsis, and she left no immediate survivors other than her husband, Allen Gardner (1930–2021).

Publications

Tugendhat, B. (1960). The normal feeding behavior of the three-spinded stickleback. Behaviour, 15, 284–318.(a) Tugendhat, B. (1960). The distributed feeding behavior of the three-spinded stickleback: I. Electric shock is administered in the food area. Behaviour, 16, 159–187.(b) Gardner, B. T., & Wallach, L. (1966). Shapes of figures identified as a baby's head. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 20, 135–142. Gardner, B. T. (1966). Hunger and characteristics of the prey in the hunting behavior of salticid. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 62, 475–478. Gardner RA, Van Cantfort TE, Gardner BT. 1992. Categorical replies to categorical questions by cross-fostered chimpanzees. The American Journal of Psychology. 105: 27–57. Drumm P, Gardner BT, Gardner RA. 1968. Vocal and gestural responses of cross-fostered chimpanzees. The American Journal of Psychology. 99: 1–29. Gardner BT, Gardner RA. 1985. Signs of intelligence in cross-fostered chimpanzees. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 308: 159–76. Gardner RA, Gardner BT. 1984. A vocabulary test for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology (Washington, D.C.: 1983). 98: 381–404. Gardner RA, Gardner BT. 1978. Comparative psychology and language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 309: 37–76. Gardner RA, Gardner BT. 1975. Early signs of language in child and chimpanzee. Science. 187: 752–3. Gardner RA, Gardner BT. 1969. Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. Science. 165: 664–72.