Primate Personalities

Monkeys, like people, have different personalities and personality traits. The Primate Personalities Creative Inquiry, led by Brett Frye and Dr. Lisa Rapaport in the Department of Biological Sciences, investigates possible connections between different characteristics of monkeys and their behavior. Primate Personalities began with six students helping Frye with research for her dissertation, but evolved beyond Frye’s research as students began to ask their own questions and look into new areas of research. “The students have perspectives that I don’t. It makes for better research when you get everyone’s perspectives,” Frye said.

The Primate Personalities Creative Inquiry is divided into several projects. One group of students studies whether male and female golden lion tamarins react differently to food, while another investigates whether handedness predicts behavior in these monkeys. The students also are investigating possible connections between personality and physiology in common marmoset monkeys. The first step in beginning the research for each group is to design an ethogram, which carefully lists and defines the animals’ behavior. Then the team places food or an object in an enclosure with the monkeys and uses the ethogram to record the time and duration of different behaviors the monkeys exhibit in reaction to the food or object.

In order to closely study the monkeys’ behavior, the students record ten-minute videos that begin when the food or object is introduced. Coding behaviors from the videos can be challenging; the students have to stop and re-watch the videos so often that coding a ten-minute trial can take almost five times as long. The projects found that sex is not a factor in tamarin approach to novel foods and that there is only a weak link between handedness and behavior in golden lion tamarins. Although these results contrast the expected outcomes, unanticipated results can be equally informative; students are learning how to navigate the imperfections and surprises that often appear in research. “It’s giving them really nice experience with how you really do a scientific project. From doing a literature search, coming up with predictions, how you test them and actually analyzing the data,” Rapaport said.

The students have had various opportunities to present their work at national and international conferences. In 2016, they presented posters at four different conferences, including the International Primatological Society and American Society of Primatologists in Chicago, Illinois. Tara Brown, a senior biological sciences major who traveled to Chicago, presented a poster on the Creative Inquiry’s research and was able to attend talks from leaders in primate research. This year, students will travel to the annual meetings for the Animal Behavior Society in Toronto, Canada and the American Society of Primatologists in Washington, D.C. Brown has benefited in other ways from her involvement with this Creative Inquiry project. She was one of six students in the country to be offered a summer internship with the Southwest National Primate Research Center. Brown credits the experience and connections she gained from working on the Creative Inquiry with helping her to transition into her internship. “It gives me a lot of really good experience focusing more in-depth on something. You start to read papers and learn the big names in the field and start to admire people who do certain work,” Brown said.

Today, the scientific community knows little about the personalities of golden lion tamarin and marmoset monkeys. Rapaport says that the students’ work, especially the sex-differences project, could be published in a scientific journal. For now, the students will continue to ask questions and conduct research on these animals’ behavior.