Primate In Psychology

A few weeks ago, I spent a lovely Monday afternoon observing two different primates at the Santa Ana Zoo. I got to the zoo around two in the afternoon, and to my surprise, the zoo was decently crowded. The Santa Ana Zoo is smaller in comparison to other zoos like the Los Angeles Zoo, but still had a decent amount of animals there. Covering a small 20 acres of land, I came across two primates that fit perfectly for the purposes of this course project. I chose to observe an endangered ape, the white-handed gibbon, and an endangered new world monkey, the golden-headed lion tamarin.

Primates are one of the most interesting mammals on earth, not only because of their complex social structures, but because they hold so many similar characteristics to humans. Primates are often cited as our closest living relatives and on two separate occasions I observed four separate species of primates at the San Diego Zoo that can justify their use of their physical characteristics and behaviors that may be similar as well as different to the other primates and ours.

Throughout the term, reading the book, “Through a Window” by Jane Goodall has been quite intriguing for me, in that it has inspired me with new ideas and perceptions about how our own species has evolved over time. I have really enjoyed seeing the many similarities that hominids share with other primate species, especially chimpanzees. Goodall’s research only further proves that we are not only extremely biologically similar to chimpanzees in our DNA, but have many behavioral similarities as well. The film, “Monkey in the Mirror” also shows support for our likeness in intellectuality. These documented findings on chimpanzee and human resemblances provides the strong evidence needed to conclude the fact that humans do indeed share a common ancestor with great apes.

According to my observation, even though Chimpanzee, and Gorilla are similar, they differ in many other ways when we go deeper in physical, and behavioral traits. However, both species also share the majority part of their DNA with Humans. Based on some reliable researches, some scientists realized that humans did not come from apes but instead shared common ancestors. As a matter of fact, humans and Primates are different, but share most of their genome, explaining why we found some similar patterns of behavior among humans, and

A psychologist in the 1950’s by the name of Harry Harlow did a study on the parent-infant bond using a baby monkey and two artificial mothers. To make the experiment proper, Harlow removed the infant from its biological mother early on and was raised with individual cages (Myers, 2010, p. 188). The experiment was set up so that there were two “mothers”; one with the monkey’s blanket and the other had a bottle attached to a wire skeleton. This experiment was to test if a soft, caring mother, or one that provided food whenever pleased would more comfort an infant monkey.

Primate intelligence correlates to primate cognition which is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of primates (Low). In the book Human Evolution and Culture, chapter five "Human Evolution Biological and Culture" states that primates share a lot of common features with mammals but what makes them uniquely different than many other mammals is that primates have a wide range of physical and social traits (86). The social relationships of primates are unique because just like humans, they relationship begin with the mother and other adults that the younger dependable primates. "The dependency of infant primates offers an evolutionary benefit that allows infant primates more time to examine and master the intricate behaviors necessary to survival while enjoying the care and protection of mature adults."(87) Primates have the privilege of having a large brain the size similar to body size to learn the culture and the way of life they live. Larger brains give primates the advantage to obtain an enormous amount of learning and integrate data. Primates have a special gift in areas of their brain that's dedicated to speech and language. (94) Primates have the special ability to communicate with each other as well as with humans and are the "only habitual toolmaking animal" (96). Although primates are more cognitively advanced than many other animals/mammals, researchers and critics still debate on how to define, compare and study intelligence and the growth of

They are very fast and can be able to run within short distances using the most minimal time. It takes less than 10 seconds to run within a distance of approximately 100 meters. While the animals move around they try to monitor the environment as quadrupedally and monitoring of the environment can be able to take as much as up to ten minutes in any case they have doubts of where they are, this alerts them of any predators. Consortship is a situation where the two animals would stay close to each other and monitor the movement and environment of each other. This is done as long as the animals are out in an environment that is not seen as being friendly. The patas can be seen to be less vocal and they move around in silence, they make certain noise only once when they have seen a predator. The noise or the sound takes just a few seconds as long as the danger is taken away

Non human primates’ social organization can provide useful information how human social evolution occurs. We will go over main points of how similar and different non human primates such as chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas’ society are compared to ours, humans.

     I think that if culture is defined as learned behavior, than it is reasonable to say that primates posses a form of culture. Primates have been observed making tools to aid in collecting food and developing communication system, both of which are learned behaviors.

Through this assignment, we will see how primates express their behaviors and understand the meaning behind them. For my observation, it will be based on the orangutans, which is classified in the genus Pongo. The San Diego zoo itself is set up with a lot of ropes, balls, hammocks, rocks and more for the animal to interact with in the grassy area. There are many levels of ground elevations that allowed the primate to have maximum space to explore around and live in. After seeing how the specie interacts and behaves, I can relate it to human behaviors and how we gain our roots from them. One of the small orangutans I observed was very active and kept climbing on different levels of the ropes and interacted with many other of the inhabitants.

Joseph Henrich began, A Puzzling Primate, by describing how physically inept human beings are when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. He continues with this logic when he demonstrates, that humans in this era, would not be able to survive if placed in the wild forest environment. Due to the biological weakness of humans, culture became a necessary defense mechanism and a form of protection. Culture became a unique way for humans to adapt. Despite the obvious physical weakness of humans, through culture we have rose to be the dominant species.

Play is expressed as being one of the most sophisticated forms of primate-to-primate interaction (Demaru et al. 2015). During play, the main form of emotional communication is through facial expression (Demaru et al. 2015). In humans, facial expressions are a universal display of non-verbal communication, and they are immediately read and responded to by conspecifics that bear witness to them (Cattaneo & Pavesi 2014). Play faces (PF) – an open mouth, or an open mouth with teeth showing- are used to signal the want to play and are influenced by characteristics of the play interaction (Demaru et al. 2015). For instance, aggressive behavior during play can influence the PF (Demaru et al. 2015).

Climbing, when it comes to the observed non-human primates, is used as a way of exercise as well as encouraging a sense of security and survival. Climbing the trees expends energy in the monkeys, often leaping between branches and trees at whim. Beyond this, climbing allows the monkeys to get adjusted and familiar with their surroundings as well as giving them a decent vantage point to see potential predators or prey. With humans, however, climbing serves other purposes. Humans utilize climbing for a number of reasons that are, in the grand scheme of things, very rarely survival.

Primates have always been viewed as a species that communicates by hand signals and other bodily gestures. The view that is now seen is that “comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intellectually perform and understand impulsive or habitual communicational

One of the main reasons why we are so interested in the other primates is that by looking at them we can obtain some ideas of what our ancestor must have been like a few millions years ago. Even though, we are not descended from any modern-type monkey or ape, our lineage does appear to have gone through stages in which we were a medium-sized, reasonably intelligent creature with good binocular vision, hands that were good at manipulation and the ability to climb trees. An evolutionary trend in primates involves the development of offspring both before and after birth and their integration into complex social systems. Another trend in primate evolution has been toward a more elaborate brain. In addition to brain size and gestation periods,