"CapuchinAI, a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen and facial recognition software, could help scientists study primate intelligence in the wild."
"One day last summer, a curious white-faced capuchin encountered a strange contraption in the forest. There, in the middle of the Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, sat a 15-inch touch screen, mounted in a wooden frame. As the monkey, an alpha male named Papi, began investigating — poking the device here, prodding it there — his fingers landed on the screen. Suddenly, a piece of dried banana dropped into a tray below the frame.
Before long, Papi learned the basic rules of the device: touch the screen, get a dried banana slice. He also provided proof of concept for CapuchinAI, a new device designed to assess the cognitive abilities of monkeys in the wild. The testing apparatus, which the researchers described in a new paper, used A.I.-powered facial recognition software to detect capuchins in real time and record their responses to a simple learning task.
The scientists hope that more sophisticated versions of the device, which they will begin testing in the coming weeks, will shed new light on primate evolution and intelligence, and answer questions that would be impossible to study in a lab, such as how a monkey’s smarts affect its success and survival.
“If we really want to understand how primates make decisions, if we want to understand how they’re using these large brains that they evolved, we have to really put it in the context of the world in which they’re navigating,” said Marcela Benítez, a primatologist at Emory University and an author of the new paper, which was published in the American Journal of Primatology on Tuesday. “But that is a lot easier said than done.”"
