I am in a psychology Ph.D. program in Neuroscience and Animal Behavior at Emory University. I am currently working on my master’s project, in which I am working to shed light on the basis of the emergence of sex differences in object preferences, such as toy preferences. Using generic toys and working with group-housed rhesus monkeys allows us to study potential biological bases of preferences without the socialization pressures of human culture. A pilot study conducted with human toys showed some differences in the monkeys that were similar to the pattern of preferences seen in boys and girls. We are conducting our research in collaboration with researchers who will conduct a similar study with young children.
While at Carleton, I worked with the tamarins for two years. I was involved with the natural kinds categorization research, the food sharing research, and face processing research. My training in the primate cognition laboratory was critical to my continued success because it made me confident in my ideas and prepared me to be able to work both within a team and independently on research projects. At big research universities, undergraduate assistants are not usually so involved in the creative aspects of research. Working with the tamarins also gave me a sense of what could and could not be done when working with a primate population.

When I first started my work with the tamarins, I was strongly interested in questions about cognition. What were these primates capable of doing, and how could we best test them to demonstrate their mental capacities? As I progressed in research, I realized that even when we found some answers to the cognitive questions, the questions that continued to linger with me were questions about how the animals’ relationships to each other. In the data we collected, there were often individual differences, and I became intensely curious about these. Were they related to sex? Dominance? Other unknown factors? There was richness in the differences between the individuals in the colony that our data analyses could not take into account. While the focus of my interests had shifted slightly, my fascination and desire to pursue questions related to animal behavior was greatly strengthened and inspired by the tamarin work.

These questions about social interactions are what brought me to Emory and Dr. Kim Wallen’s lab, first as a summer undergraduate research fellow, and then as a graduate student. At the Yerkes National Primate Center Field Research Station, our rhesus monkeys are housed in large indoor-outdoor naturalistic social groups. This setting will allow me to ask a variety of questions about how social factors such as age, sex, and rank might affect perception and cognition.