Scientifically, whats going on?

Whew, its been a busy week. I've been meaning to write this blog about scientific endevours on the island for quite a while now so I'll get right to it.
So there's a few groups of people who work on the island, and I'll categorize them as the long-term-researchers (Maria, me, Grace, Doreen, and Aki), The Yale Kids, and The Hardvard Guys. Grace and I are working on Maria's project, hormone analysis and adulte male behavior. Doreen is working on a project for Anja Widdig at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. They are studying the behavior of the entire cohort (monkeys born in the same year) of 2004 and are interested in paternity (relation to their father). Aki is from a University in Japan and is studying play behavior. She records juveniles alllll day long, and will eventually go back to look at the facial expressions and body language that initiats play behaviors.
Second there are the Yale Kids. They are all working under Laurie Santos, a Psychologist at Yale. There are usually four of them working here at a time, and they stay for about 4 weeks at a time, coming and going in groups of 2 so that there are always 4 people. Yale has purchased a house in the next town over, Naguabo, where they all stay. Their projects are mostly looking time experiments. Each Yale Kid is in charge of one experiment, and they video tape the reactions fo the monkeys to the experiment. The theory is that monkeys look longer at things that are unnatural, unusual, or implicitly incorrect with the laws of physics. The experiments are adapted fom ones done with human babies. Of course they all have complex psychological names for the experiments, but I am an Anthropologist, so I'll explain it in those terms. One girl did an experiment to see if monkeys understand statistics, so she had a box with a clear front with a whole bunch of red balls and a few white balls. On one randomly decided condition she pulls out a white ball supposidly from inside the box but its fixed, and on another she pulls out a a red one. Another experiment is a similar set up where they pour from a pitcer of blue water into a clear cup, then with a piece of cardboard cover up the aparatus. When it is lifted the cup is placed under 1 of 4 conditions on a little thingy so that the cup is tilted, all fixed where the cup is traded and filled with dried colored play dough. In two the play dough is flat, ungiving to the proper forces of gravity, one with blue dough and the other with yellow. In the other two the play dough is made to look as if it is indeed flowing the direction it would while tilted, one blue and one yellow. Once they go through their data with looking times they will gain an understanding of the implicit intelligences of rehsus macaques.
The other type of experiments the Yale kids have are searching experiments, where they give the monkeys different amounts of information about where food may be, and then see where the monkeys will explore. In one there are levers and fake bananas, which the monkeys destroyed, frustrating the hell out of its creator. The other involved ramps and two grapes. It was originally called Grand Theft Auto, where grapes were placed on stickes taped to the top of two remote control cars. It's a theory of mind experiment, where the experimenter places grapes in two separate places, then turns away so the monekys "think" he cannot see, and the grapes move, the top to the position of the second, and the second to a position on the bottom of the aparatus. Then the monkeys are allowed to approach and supposidly if they have a theory of mind, they will go for the grape that is at the botoom, that the experimenter does not know about. Its been fun to see the stagest this experiment has gon through, becasue the first 2 set ups needed to be adjusted. Now it is just ramps and rollilng grapes, and is called "Grand Theft Grape."
All the Yale Kids have a certain number of monkeys have to run through the experiment to gain proper statistical power, and some the monkeys are very interested in watching and some not. They roam around the island with their aparatus in groups of two, one recording one with the experiment in hand. They have to find monkeys that are alone, and who will pay attention. Its fun to watch, because in order to get a monkeys attention they set up in front of it, and then yell "monkey, MONKEY!" or something of the sort. Sometimes the monkeys respond well, sometimes they charge as soon as two grapes are presented, sometimes they walk away.
The Third group of researchers are the Hardvard Guys, working with Marc Hauser with his cognitive science lab. Hauser is a very well known and very cutting edge in the literature of cogsci. If you go to the Cayo Santiago website under literature, all of his papers are posted. Some that are of interest to me deal with neurological elements of facial expressions. They've found that in slow mo, different sides of the face produce facial expressions milisecons before the other, showing neural hemisphere differentiation for respective corresponding emotions. Anyway, they are currently doing play back experiments, where they electronically mess around with rhesus calls, and have speakers set up to play back to them noises in different frequencies, volumes, orders, you name it. They then record how the monkeys responed. Interesting stuff. The other day I was working next to Doreen and we heard a WIERD noises, kind of like elephand shouts, looked at each other and realized it was the playback experiments. Maria soon after asked us, sounding pretty frightened, what exacly the noise was. Funny.
Oh yes, a final note on the Yale kids: they create all their aparati(?) once they get here. They are all made out of foam board, mass quantities of duck tape, and whatever other materials necessary from walmart, in a creative manner. These make the experiments cheap, and easy to replace if they get attacked by the monkeys, which they often are.
We all enjoy talking about the fine elements of DOING research that are not mentioned in scientific papers. These include rediculous miniscule elements that make or break an experiment, for me purple berries, for them flat groud, whacky noises that attract monkey attention, knee pads, keeping the video camera charged, rain, not to mention heat, exhaustion, and hunger for us all.