Phase Two Data

-

 

Red-tailed monkey participants by Steve Gotz


Phase Two Data


I felt like this project was extremely successful! I accomplished everything I set out to do despite being a one-woman research team (couldn't have done it without the zookeepers of course!) and gathered lots of interesting observations and data. Also it was just plain fun! Who doesn't want to watch cute monkeys and lemurs everyday?


I'll relay the data from this phase below:



                                 

Here the monkeys showed that they definitely favored the blue boxes over the yellow ones! Interestingly however, their interest in the blue boxes waned across the first three days, then spiked on the last day. Their interest in the yellow boxes was increased on the first day of Phase Two compared to the following days, but remained about the same on days two through four.


And the data from the lemurs:



Remember to keep in mind that there are more lemurs and thus boxes than red-tailed monkeys when looking at this data.

So funny how their interest actually increased in the blue boxes by a lot after the first day! I am not sure what could be the cause of this. I thought perhaps the weather, but it was actually colder on the second day than the first day, and they were always let out at the same time, give or take twenty minutes.


And here we have the number of visits to the boxes in the table below:




Lots to work with here, now on to the results!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Results

-
Image
  Ring-tailed lemur participant, Amy Ta-dah! After comparing the data and drawing my conclusions from the results, I created a presentation which I gave live at the Summer Undergraduate Research conference for my university, and then later recorded it for YouTube, which I will include in the next post. I will present the results below: Here we have a side-by-side comparison of the data from Phase One with both the monkeys, and lemurs. Taking into account that the lemurs could likely smell the food in the blue boxes once they got close enough while the monkeys likely could not, these results are pretty much what I would have expected.    Overall, the monkeys visited both colors of boxes less, while the lemurs visited them more. Some of this I account for the increase in the crowned lemurs' participation during Phase Two. I think the most useful data in regards to the participant animals' cognition came from my own observations during the study. Of both the lemurs and the m...
Read more

Research Plan!

-
Image
 I want to be able to measure behavioral differences between the two species --- how their interactions with the new stimulus differ between each other and what that may mean. How quickly do the animals investigate the new items? How quickly do they figure out that they hold food and how to get into them?How quickly and how well do they figure out, if they do, that only certain containers hold a reward? And finally, how well, if they do, do they remember everything they have learned from their previous encounters with the stimulus, after a period of absence from it? So, the stimulus and protocols need to be the same for both, which shouldn't be a problem as the stimulus will be designed to fit both primate species capabilities.  At first, I was thinking of doing plastic boxes with a lift lid. This would work easily as far as putting food items inside and watching them interact with them. However, after purchasing a lift-lid box, filling it with tuna and cat treats and presenti...
Read more