Results

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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 monkeys making lots of conscious choice of interacting with the blue boxes over the yellow boxes during Phase Two, but not very much during Phase One.


Female crowned lemur participant, Tasherit



From my understanding of these animals during this project, I believe that they performed very similarly to one another and both showed about an equal level of cognitive ability, although their styles of interaction were different. If the general belief that Old World monkeys such as my red-tailed monkey participants are much more cognitively superior to lemurs holds true, I would have expected to see larger disparities in the data and observations between the two groups.


See the next blog post for the video of my presentation, which will summarize this project from its conception to conclusion.

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