[BERG] BERG seminar this week

Dear All, On Wednesday this week at 4pm, Gloria Sabbatini (Unit of Cognitive Primatology, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Rome, Italy) will be talking about tool use in capuchin monkeys. Please, see below the title and short abstract for her talk. This meeting will be online (link below). Action planning and tool use in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp.) The study of how animals anticipate future actions is crucial to understand cognitive processes that guide behavior. The capacity to alter object manipulation not only on the basis of the immediate task demands but also of the next task to be performed involves second-order motor planning abilities . This response dependency is instantiated in the end-state comfort (ESC) effect, the capability of grasping an object in a way that enhances hand comfort and object control while performing the next action. Research using different tasks has reported evidence of the ESC effect in a number of nonhuman primate species, including capuchin monkeys. Several factors are supposed to affect the strength of the expression of second-order motor planning abilities. In this talk I will present work on action planning in capuchin monkeys in which factors such as direction of the task (self-directed or externally directed), initial object orientation, number of object functional ends, manual preference and age were investigated. These data on capuchins add to the literature concerning object grasping and manipulation in nonhuman primates and encourage the use of grasping tasks to study motor planning and to compare cognition processes across primates. Best, Gema Schedule for future meetings: Date Time Speaker Topic Location 14/12/2022 3pm Elias Garcia Pelegrin (University of Cambridge, UK) Crows and understanding of magic tricks Online Link to the online meetings: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmee… ________________________________ Scotland's University for Sporting Excellence The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159