Babies and Lemurs

My name is Anna Jaffe, I am a rising senior at Carolina Friends School, and I am working in Dr. Elizabeth Brannon's lab at Duke (http://www.duke.edu/web/mind/level2/faculty/liz/cdlab.htm). I am going to be working there for seven weeks, and by the end will have a project to present. I am working in the baby lab most of the time (except for from 3-5, when I am with the lemurs), which is where I will do my project. Right now we are working on ordinal numerical knowledge in infants, which looks at the way infants can understand numbers. Can they tell which of two numbers is greater? Can they see when that changes?

Although Dr. Brannon is my P.I., I am working with lots of different people in the lab. In the baby lab, I am working with Umay Suanda and Emily Hopkins, as well as others in the lab. I am also running tests in the Duke Lemur Center every day with Jennifer, Rosa, and Peter.

Today was my second day in my lab, but I have jumped in right away. I left lunch early so that I could meet the baby who was coming at 12:30. He was a cutle little guy, and was wide-eyed at the big shiny buildings and equipment. We sat him in the chair, and then Umay, Emily and I ran the test. The baby looked at a screen, where different images showed up. He was shown similar images (i.e. more green dots than red dots) for a habituation period. Then, he was given test trials, where he was shown either a familiar (more green than red) or a novel (more red than green) image. We recorded looking time to see whether the baby looked more at the new images than at the ones to which he had been habituated. For his hard wrk, the baby was given an infant scientist award and a t-shirt!

At the DLC, Rosa, Jennifer and I ran the tests on six monkeys. The lemurs work with a machine with a touch screen. Each lemur does either Match to Sample, Risk, or Lesser Numbers. In Match to Sample, the lemurs have to match an image to one of two options; in Risk, lemurs are first habituated to two images-one image gives them two sugar pellets every time, and the other either gives them one or three-then they must pick-will they take the risk or stay with the familiar two pellets; and lesser numbers-the lemur must pick the square with the smaller number to get the pellet.

The lemurs are all so fun, and they all have personalities! Pedro is sweet and very friendly; he is a mongoose lemur. Today for some reason he was curled up into a tiny little ball on the edge of a branch (perhaps he was cold from the fan?). However, he was as excited as ever to run the experiment and would always come over to see us when we walked past. Red Rover, who we don't run tests on, is an old lemur. He was born in 1982 (older than I am-lemurs are middle aged/old at around 15-20) and is now pretty demented. He sits around in his cage with his tongue out-it doesn't go back in! Another lemur, whom I have nicknamed John Travolta, has overactive scent glands (what a smell!). I have nicknamed him thus because he reminds me of a young John Travolta in "Grease"-his hair looks the same as the boys hair in the movie, as if he did it that way on purpose (it's actually his scent...). He is a sweety, albeit that he smells absolutely terrible-like nothing else I've ever seen. And then there's the baby sifaka we walk past on our way back to the lab....but "don't get too close or the mother will pee on you," says Jennifer.

All together I love my lab, and can't wait to keep working with such adorable subjects! Even entering data isn't too bad when every once in a while you get to hang out with two of the cutest things: babies and lemurs!