Agribusiness, Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Cassava, Garri, food security, Agritech and the Red Meat Value Chain.
Showing posts with label glass booth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glass booth. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Macaques Are Learning to Communicate with Touch-screens.
Akita, a 10-year-old Japanese macaque, sits in a glass booth calmly tapping away as colored dots flash on a video touch-screen anchored to a wall in front of him. Red, blue, yellow – he picks the dots in the requisite order, then grabs for his reward: fresh blueberries that pop out of a tube onto the floor next to him.
Akita is one of eight adult Japanese macaques at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago being trained to use a touch-screen. For now, he’s mastering simple sequencing tasks. But soon, researchers will start him on new exercises aimed ultimately at getting inside his head—finding out what he and the other macaques think and feel about their life in the zoo.
A death or birth among their troop? Too many noisy visitors pressed up to the glass in front of them? Researchers hope to find out how these things affect the animals so that they can adjust animal care in response. Touch-screens, they hope, will provide a way to do this.
“The goal is to evaluate and enhance their welfare,” says Katherine Cronin, lead research scientist for the zoo’s macaque project, which she believes to be unique to North America.
Melissa Bateson, a professor of ethology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, has studied ways to communicate with animals and consulted with Cronin. Over the past decade, she says, animal welfare scientists have tried to adapt tasks used to measure emotions in humans to animals, but the process has been “quite laborious,” with a person needed to interact with the animal, offer it choices and record its behavior.
“Translation of these tasks to a touch-screen that can offer choices and record data automatically would be a great advance,” she says, and “would pave the way for more widespread use of these novel approaches in applied settings such as zoos.”
The research has helped Cronin and her team glean insights into the monkeys’ social environment—a rigidly defined hierarchy that the macaques self-police. This means that the monkeys voluntarily come to the booths during training time (generally mid-day, five days a week) in their ranked order, with alpha Akita first.
Even if the macaques don’t get to the point of being able to communicate their cares and woes to their keepers, the touch-screen training has helped enhance their daily lives. Cronin says that research shows engaging in tasks that challenge the monkeys’ minds is in itself “a way to improve their welfare and keep them stimulated, because they’re such smart, complex animals.”
culled from discovermagazine.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Agribusiness ideas.
Popular Posts
-
Israeli gov't to fund medical cannabis research. The Ministries of Agriculture and Health will provide NIS 8 million in funding for 1...
-
Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas and his latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial i...
-
Keeping pet trim is good for pet's health and owners' money. Feeding pets indiscriminately with food high in sugar, fat and cert...
-
Farmers, who regularly irrigate bananas, can boot the weight of the fruit by more than 30 per cent. More than 90 per cent of famers in K...
-
The satellite and the chimpanzee,this is how satellite data changed chimpanzee conservation efforts.Chimpanzees are an endangered species ...
-
The regulations require producers who raise cattle, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals to obtain a veterinarian’s approval b...
AGRIBUSINESS EDUCATION.
Translate
I-CONNECT -AGRICULTURE
AGRIBUSINESS TIPS.
AGRIBUSINESS.
The Agriculture Daily
veterinarymedicineechbeebolanle-ojuri.blogspot.com Cassava: benefits of garri as a fermented food. Cassava processing involves fermentation which is a plus for gut health. The fermentation process removes the cyanogenic glucosides present in the fres...