Testing on laboratory-housed primates has long been the standard for research in cognitive
psychology and other areas. As an alternative to this, a group of socially housed chacma
baboons (Papio hamadrayas ursinus) at the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education
near Phalaborwa in Limpopo Province, South Africa, were the subjects for a set of basic
cognitive tests. The purpose of the tests was to explore the importance of analogical reasoning
by means of testing perceptual and conceptual skills in baboons. The main aim of this
research is to investigate the degree to which captive but socially housed baboons are useful
as experimental subjects, and to develop an apparatus and protocol to perform these tests in
situ in the baboons' home cages. Five baboons were chosen as the subjects for
experimentation. All subjects completed three groups of tasks to a criterion of at least 80%
success over four successive experiments. The tasks tested baboons' discrimination ability
between two coloured tiles, a reversal of that same discrimination task, and a simple match to-
sample task. As a result of time constraints, further tasks testing conceptual ability had to
be abandoned. A record was kept of environmental and social factors that may have
influenced the motivation of the subjects. The time taken to complete each experiment
correlated in many cases with the number of distractions experienced by the subjects. There
appeared to be no significant correlation between the score attained by a subject and the
number of distractions experienced by that subject. The greater number of distractions
experienced by the subjects was a result of the more engaged social world in which these
baboons exist. Consequently, their motivation to perform repetitive cognitive tests was
decreased, and needed to be countered in novel ways. An apparatus and a protocol for testing
under these conditions were developed. Testing baboons' cognitive skills in these
circumstances is both possible and desirable for ethical reasons, though the process takes
longer than under laboratory conditions. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2004
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/10413 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | McFall, Andrew. |
| Contributors | Henzi, Peter., Barrett, Louise. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_Za |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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