Tomonaga / Poster

Are cognitive experiments stressful works for the chimpanzee (pan troglodytes)?: relationship between performance and physiological factors during cognitive experiments.

Masaki TOMONAGA⁽¹⁾, Juri SUZUKI⁽²⁾, Satoshi OHKURA⁽³⁾, Minoru NAKAMURA⁽⁴⁾, and Tsuneyuki ABE^(4)
(1) Department of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan
⁽²⁾ Center for Human Evolutionary Modeling Research, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan
⁽³⁾ Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan
⁽⁴⁾ Institute of Beauty Sciences, Shiseido Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan

     To clarify relationship between performance and physiological factors during cognitive experiments by an adult female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), we collected various physiological data for more than six months: (1) saliva was collected before and after experimental sessions by using cotton pads to obtain salivary cortisol, (2) urine samples during experiments were also collected for the analyses of catecholamines, and (3) swelling of sexual skin was rated in order to estimate menstrual cycles. We also observed and videotaped the behavior of the subject during cognitive experiments. In this presentation, we will analyze (1) changes in baseline cortisol level as a function of menstrual cycles, (2) relationships between behavioral interruptions and menstrual cycles, (3) relationships between cognitive performance (e.g., accuracy) and menstrual cycles, and (4) differences in cortisol level before and after experiments in comparison with the data from no-experiment days. On the basis of these data, we will discuss the possibility of chimpanzee models for human cognitive stress.