Joint ASP/MPIG 2025 Chicago Conference

It was great seeing all my colleagues, friends, and research assistants again. This year, the joint ASP and MPIG (both conferences I frequent to) was held in the suburbs of Chicago. I presented my dissertation work as a podium presentation and a poster. One of my research assistant also presented her poster! Both my podium presentation and poster are now linked and available via ResearchGate [PODIUM PRESENTATION] What Contrafreeloading On Cognitive Testing Apparatus Can Tell You About Enrichment Value: A Study in Captive Ruffed Lemurs (Varecia spp.)

ABSTRACT: Contrafreeloading is broadly defined as an animal’s willingness to work for food, despite it being freely available elsewhere and could be used to determine whether an enrichment item is valuable due to the animal’s desire to perform effortful food tasks. We conducted a contrafreeloading study with a population of captive ruffed lemurs (Varecia spp.) and gave them a binary choice, choose to use a cognitive testing apparatus (SMARTA2) to work for food or eat from freely available food in a bowl. The subjects (N = 7) as a whole do not exhibit a preference in either contrafreeloading or the bowl (χ²(1, N = 70) = 0.723, p = 0.340). However, two individuals (Harriott and Helene) contrafreeloaded in all of their sessions. We also found a general positive and statistically significant trend in subjects’ willingness to contrafreeload as time went on (R2 = 0.17 , F(1, 68) = 13.83, p < 0.001). We found that time (days) significantly predicted the likelihood of contrafreeloading (β = 0.69, p < 0.001). We posit that SMARTA2 offers positive reinforcement value, which elicit subjects to contrafreeload. Additionally, most subjects prefer to contrafreeload as time went on, likely being operantly conditioned by their choice; choose the bowl and lose access to SMARTA2. Results from this study could shed light on the welfare and enrichment benefits of cognitive research for captive primates.

[POSTER] SMARTA2: An Updated, Open-sourced, Android-based Touchscreen Apparatus for Visual Discrimination Tasks and Contrafreeloading in Ruffed Lemurs (Varecia spp.) ABSTRACT: Open-sourced cognitive testing apparatus are sometimes limited in their capabilities for broader cognitive tasks or different stimuli presentation. Here, we introduce a modified, open-sourced, and relatively inexpensive Android-based touchscreen apparatus for broad visual discrimination tasks. SMARTA2 is an updated version of SMARTA (Subject-Mediated Automatic Remote Testing Apparatus) (Vagell et al., 2018) which was designed specifically for color vision. SMARTA2 comes with a self-closing bowl attachment for contrafreeloading studies, can log data automatically, and upload them to the cloud. A pilot study was conducted with captive ruffed lemurs (Varecia spp.) (N = 7) with varying research experience at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. There was a strong negative correlation between experience level and training time, r(5) = -0.80, p = 0.029, indicating that individuals with more experience required significantly less training time to use SMARTA2. A Fisher’s Exact Test was conducted to determine whether there was a significant association between choosing "SMARTA2" or "Bowl" and the chosen direction ("Left" or "Right"). There was no statistically significant relationship between these variables (p = 1.0) suggesting that subjects are not more likely to choose SMARTA2 or Bowl based on where they were placed. We validated the use of SMARTA2 as an appropriate cognitive testing apparatus for lemurs as well as a contrafreeloading apparatus.