A UQ researcher will have daily access to a large group of apes thanks to a $30,000 fellowship with a world-renowned scientific institute.
Dr Emma Collier-Baker has been awarded a Queensland–Smithsonian Fellowship and will spend six months studying the cognitive abilities of orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons housed at the Think Tank within the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington DC.
The Queensland–Smithsonian Fellowship Program began after Premier Peter Beattie signed a unique Memorandum of Understanding between the Queensland Government and the Smithsonian Institution in 2000, which has since been extended until 2010.
The Fellowship Program aims to foster an interchange of knowledge and skills between Queensland and the Smithsonian by providing an opportunity for up to three Queenslanders each year to undertake a project at the Smithsonian.
The National Zoo, visited by two million people a year, is part of the Smithsonian Institution consisting of 15 museums, 144 affiliate museums and nine research centres throughout America and the world.
Established in 1846 following a generous bequest of 100,000 gold sovereigns (equivalent to US$500,000) by a British scientist, James Smithson, the Institution today has an operating budget of more than $600 million.
The fellowship, a Queensland Government Smart State initiative, covers Dr Collier-Baker’s travelling and living expenses while overseas from March until September 2007.
Dr Collier-Baker, a postdoctoral research fellow working with Associate Professor Thomas Suddendorf at UQ’s Early Cognitive Development Unit within the School of Psychology, said she was thrilled when told she had won the award.
“The Think Tank has a specially designed ‘smart room’ for conducting research with the zoo’s orangutans. It has windows that allow the orangutans to work on tasks, indicate choices and receive food rewards from the experimenter. The smart room is also equipped with a touchscreen computer monitor. Gorillas will be tested at the Ape House and gibbons at Gibbon Ridge,” she said.
“All tests are non-invasive behavioural tasks designed to tell us more about how apes mentally represent the world around them – as our closest living relatives, what cognitive skills do we share and what underlies the differences that set us apart?
“Participation by the animals is voluntary and they would seem to enjoy testing sessions: for example, the orangutans regularly cross the 'O Line' – a series of cables and towers – from the Ape House to the Think Tank of their own volition to engage in problem-solving tasks.
“Another rare feature of the Think Tank is the accessibility given to the general public to observe some of the research work going on with the apes. The Think Tank is one of only a few such state-of-the-art zoo facilities for investigating ape cognition in the world so I’m really excited about the opportunity to work at the Smithsonian National Zoo next year.”
She said as well as research, she would be involved in keeper duties and public programs which would broaden her knowledge and foster additional collaborations.
“The experience could even inform the establishment of a similar facility back in Australia at some stage in the future,” she said.
For her PhD, recently completed at UQ and supervised by Dr Suddendorf, Dr Collier-Baker added tighter controls to a famous logic experiment, the invisible displacement task, in which a desired object – food or a toy – is transferred from a small container into one of three boxes.
Subjects then try to identify the box containing the object by pointing at it or walking over to it. This invisible displacement task, devised by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1930s, tests the ability to “think” about an object that is not visible.
Dr Collier-Baker tested 21 two-year-old children, 35 dogs, two chimpanzees sourced from Rockhampton Botanical Gardens and Zoo, four gibbons (siamangs) from Adelaide Zoo, and a spider monkey from Alma Park Zoo.
Her findings on dogs were published in an article in the prestigious Journal of Comparative Psychology with her colleagues Joanne Davis and Dr Suddendorf.
The article was awarded the 2004 Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award by the Division 6 Awards Committee of the American Psychological Association for the best paper published in the journal that year.
The first chimpanzee study was published in Animal Cognition with her colleagues Ms Davis, Dr Mark Nielsen, and Dr Suddendorf.
A follow-up chimpanzee study by Dr Collier-Baker and Dr Suddendorf contributed new testing methodology to the literature and has been published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology this year.
Applications for the Queensland–Smithsonian Fellowship are open to Queenslanders working in any area of mutual interest with the Smithsonian Institution, for example systematic, evolutionary, and conservation biology research, including biodiversity; palaeontology and geology; anthropology; indigenous and folk culture; art and design; history; and museum practice, education and outreach.
Media inquiries: Dr Collier-Baker (3365 6802) and Shirley Glaister at UQ Communications (3365 2339).
