An assessment of the development of a cognitive research programme and introductions in zoo-housed chimpanzees

Zoological institutions emphasise the importance of excelling in the areas of animal welfare, conservation, education, and research, not only to better the lives of the animals under their care, but to also influence the general population in the pursuit to conserve the natural world. As a result, zoo life is anything but simple. This research project monitored the lives of a captive group of chimpanzees over a two-and-a-half-year period, during which time we explored four research topics while assessing the development of a cognitive research programme and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) introductions in a zoo: welfare, cognition, public engagement with science, and animal management. The project’s use of touchscreen technology and on-exhibit research was the first of its kind for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. As a result, the researchers placed a great deal of importance not only on assessing the welfare of the chimpanzees throughout training and testing phases, but also assessing the public’s perception of cognitive research being conducted through an internationally broadcast documentary about the project. In the short duration of the project, these research naïve chimpanzees did not fully grasp the concept of video selection in our free-choice activity, but overall, the introduction of a cognitive research programme did not compromise welfare, and the chimpanzees’ repeated interest suggests that chimpanzees found the research to be reinforcing. Partly funded by the BBC, the Chimpcam Project was shown in the UK (broadcast January 2010) and in a variety of other countries, including the United States and Canada (on Animal Planet in 2011). The broadcast allowed us to gather information over the internet on the wider public’s perception of conducting research with great apes in zoos, to complement data collected on visitors to the exhibit itself. Our assessment of the documentary’s impact on public perception showed that it had a positive influence on perceptions of zoo research, scientists, welfare, and the importance of choice for animals. During this research project, a new group of chimpanzees arrived in Edinburgh as part of the international breeding programme for western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus). As the zoo’s focus switched to helping the two chimpanzee groups merge into one, we took the opportunity to apply psychological research to this context, namely the use of video as a research tool and the recognition of the importance of individual differences in response to challenge. The project maintained the cognition and welfare focus by using video introductions (allowing the chimpanzees to watch video footage of the individuals they were about to meet and track the formation of other sub-groups). In addition, personality ratings and chimpanzee behaviour during the visual access period (an animal management technique used prior to physical introductions where the groups could see each other without physical contact) were collected to examine the efficacy of these measures in guiding introductions in order to reduce risk. Personality ratings and behaviours observed during the video introductions could predict the chimpanzees’ behaviour during the physical introductions, however, the visual access period had no predictive power. The welfare implications of the introduction process were also assessed and suggested that: the choice of location (i.e. options of where to be) was more important than the total amount of available space; having individuals removed from your group was more stressful than having individuals added; self-directed behaviour (SDB) performance was context-specific where rubbing significantly increased during periods of uncertainty that were not necessarily negatively valenced; regurgitation and reingestion (R/R) decreased over time; and both in-group members and those of high ranks spent more time grooming others. Overall our data indicate that the chimpanzees coped well with both cognitive challenges and social upheaval during introductions. Despite being regularly studied in captivity and in the wild, chimpanzees have a great deal more to teach us about their world. In order to provide the best welfare for the chimpanzees in our care, we need to understand how research and management practices affect their lives and how the public interpret what we do as researchers. By understanding these aspects of their world, we can better serve those in captivity and influence public opinion on the importance of conserving those in the wild

Mobile Web Surveys: a First Look at Measurement, Nonresponse, and Coverage Errors.

This dissertation focuses on the use of smartphones for Web surveys. The current state of knowledge about whether respondents are willing and able to accurately record their answers when using such devices is evolving, but far from complete. The primary purpose of my research is therefore to investigate the implications of this new mode for various sources of error using a Total Survey Error (TSE) perspective. Each chapter reports on a different aspect of a mode experiment that I designed to compare the effect of completion device (smartphone vs. computer) on survey errors. The experiment was carried out using the LISS panel (Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences), a probability-based Web panel administered by CentERdata at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The first analysis (Chapter 2) compares response quality in the two modes. When using smartphones, respondents in this study really were more mobile and more engaged with the other people and other tasks compared to when using computers. Despite this, response quality – conscientious responding and disclosure of sensitive information – was equivalent between the two modes of data collection. The second analysis (Chapter 3) investigates the causes of nonresponse in the mobile Web version of the experiment. I found that several social, psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral measures are associated with nonresponse. These include factors known to influence participation decisions in other survey modes such as personality traits, civic engagement, and attitudes about surveys as well as factors that may be specific to this mode, including smartphone use, social media use, and smartphone e-mail use. The third analysis (Chapter 4) estimates multiple sources of error simultaneously in the mobile Web version of the experiment. Errors are estimated as a mode effect against the conventional Web survey, which serves as the benchmark. I find few overall mode effects and no evidence whatsoever of measurement effects, but a significant impact of non-coverage bias for over one-third of the estimates. Collectively, these findings suggest that non-observation errors (i.e., coverage and nonresponse), not measurement errors, are the largest obstacle to the adoption of mobile Web surveys for population-based inference.PhDSurvey MethodologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116722/1/antoun_1.pd

Measuring Group Personality with Swarm AI

The aggregation of individual personality tests to predict team performance is widely accepted in management theory but has significant limitations: the isolated nature of individual personality surveys fails to capture much of the team dynamics that drive real-world team performance. Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI), a technology that enables networked teams to think together in real-time and answer questions as a unified system, promises a solution to these limitations by enabling teams to take personality tests together and converge upon answers that best represent the group’s disposition. In the present study, the group personality of 94 small teams was assessed by having teams take a standard Big Five Inventory (BFI) test both as individuals, and as a real-time system enabled by an ASI technology known as Swarm AI. The predictive accuracy of each personality assessment method was assessed by correlating the BFI personality traits to a range of real-world performance metrics. The results showed that assessments of personality generated using Swarm AI were far more predictive of team performance than the traditional survey-based method, showing a significant improvement in correlation with at least 25% of performance metrics, and in no case showing a significant decrease in predictive performance. This suggests that Swarm AI technology may be used as a highly effective team personality assessment tool that more accurately predicts future team performance than traditional survey approaches

Chimpanzee personality and its relations with cognition and health: a comparative perspective

This thesis aimed to address two main questions. First, considering that personality is frequently associated with cognitive abilities in humans, do chimpanzees’ personalities and cognitive capacities covary in ways similar to what is observed in humans, as well as older evolutionary cousins, rhesus macaques? Second, given that human and animal personality have previously been shown to relate to health and longevity, does personality in chimpanzees also relate to various measures of health? Chapter 1 provides an introduction to and brief history of comparative personality psychology, particularly in the context of intelligence research and psychosomatic medicine. Chapter 2 describes three studies with a group of 19 zoo-housed chimpanzees who interacted with touchscreen tasks over the course of 3 years of research. We found that high Conscientious chimpanzees were more likely to stick with the tasks, and performed better as a results, but once their extra experience was taken into account, their performance advantage disappeared. However, we also found associations between better interest and performance with high Openness, high Extraversion, and low Agreeableness. In Chapter 3 we examine performance in conjunction with personality, with 9 rhesus macaques. The macaques also engaged with touchscreen tasks, but were expert subjects and displayed plateau performance. We found consistent associations between many measures of performance and both high Openness and high Friendliness (which is similar to Extraversion). With Chapter 4 we transition to our studies of personality and health. Chapter 4 examines personality and longevity in a sample of 538 personality rated, captive chimpanzees. These chimpanzees were followed for between 6 and 23 years after being rated. We found that high Agreeableness chimpanzees were more likely to live longer, but no other personality traits had a significant impact on longevity. In Chapter 5, we compared biomarkers from samples of 177 chimpanzees housed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre, and 29,314 humans from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Both samples had been tested for the most common haematological and metabolic blood biomarkers, and we used these to assess stress in the form of allostatic load, between species. We found a similar structure of biomarkers in across humans and chimpanzees. In Chapter 6, we took our allostatic load measure from chapter 5 and looked at how it was associated with personality, in the same chimpanzee sample from the Yerkes Primate Centre, and in the longitudinal Midlife in the United States and Midlife in Japan biomarker study samples, which consisted of 993 and 382 individuals, respectively. We found that Agreeableness was associated with allostatic load in both human samples, whereas Dominance was associated with allostatic load in chimpanzees. Finally, Chapter 7 summarises the results presented in these five empirical chapters, and places our findings in the context of the existing literature. We discuss the limitations of the research, and offer some suggestions for future study

Automatic Personality Prediction; an Enhanced Method Using Ensemble Modeling

Human personality is significantly represented by those words which he/she uses in his/her speech or writing. As a consequence of spreading the information infrastructures (specifically the Internet and social media), human communications have reformed notably from face to face communication. Generally, Automatic Personality Prediction (or Perception) (APP) is the automated forecasting of the personality on different types of human generated/exchanged contents (like text, speech, image, video, etc.). The major objective of this study is to enhance the accuracy of APP from the text. To this end, we suggest five new APP methods including term frequency vector-based, ontology-based, enriched ontology-based, latent semantic analysis (LSA)-based, and deep learning-based (BiLSTM) methods. These methods as the base ones, contribute to each other to enhance the APP accuracy through ensemble modeling (stacking) based on a hierarchical attention network (HAN) as the meta-model. The results show that ensemble modeling enhances the accuracy of APP

A Cognitive Task as Enrichment for Chimpanzees (\u3ci\u3ePan troglodytes\u3c/i\u3e) in Sanctuary

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hold an especially powerful attraction for researchers interested in cognition and how it developed to the degree observed in humans specifically and primates more generally. Chimpanzees are behaviorally complex primates with compelling data supporting their possession of intricate internal lives. The objective of this study was to simultaneously learn more of the cognitive process of inductive reasoning while also assessing the efficacy of a computerized box as a novel form of enrichment to aid in improving the environment of captive chimpanzees. Three social groups at the retired medical research chimpanzee sanctuary Project Chimps were given voluntary access to an interactive box inspired by previous touchscreen studies. Individuals varied widely in their interactions with the box but did not perform above chance on the preliminary levels of the task. Interest in the box was also observed to correlate negatively with the number of sessions so that exploration in the final sessions were significantly lower than that recorded in the first sessions. These results highlight the need for refinement in provisioning captive chimpanzees with interactive technology as enrichment