What better way to start the New Year than with some Monkey news? Smithsonian.com has a feature on Laurie Santos, an experimental psychologist and researcher who specialised in Monkeys. She has been doing experiments on primate cognition at Cayo Santiago, an island off the coast of Peurto Rico that is a controlled home for rhesus macaques.

Smithsonian.com: Thinking Like a Monkey

Its an interesting article on Santos experiments and primate psychology in general. My favorite part:

“She has somewhat more affection for the 11 capuchin monkeys in her lab at Yale, who are named after characters in James Bond movies (Goldfinger, Jaws, Holly Goodhead). Her work with them involves experiments on “social decision-making.” She equips them with tokens they can trade for food and studies the development of their rudimentary economy. Like human beings, they are loss-averse: if the going price is two grapes for a token, they prefer to trade with an experimenter who shows them one grape and then adds one, compared with one who shows three and takes one away. They are also sneaky. After swapping for an apple, she says, they will sometimes take a bite of it, then present the untouched side to the researcher and try to sell it back. And they have an entrepreneurial bent. At times they would offer their feces in exchange for a token, behavior that baffled the researchers until a student pointed out that every morning someone comes into the cage and scoops out the droppings—which may have given them the idea that people value them.”

This piece does a good job explaining the research, and its overall relevance. Monkeys may be capable of more varied thought processes, but there is still a large gap between theirs and human cognition.