Apex and ApeTouch: Development of a Portable Touchscreen System and Software for Primates at Zoos

Abstract

We report on the development and testing of a portable touchscreen apparatus and accompanying software program for primate enrichment, cognitive research, and husbandry applications. For zoos considering using technology to bolster scientific efforts or enhance the welfare of primates in their care, touchscreen activities offer a solution that has a long and proven record of primate use in laboratory settings as well as a history of usage in the zoo world. We review the options that are available for zoos to build their own touchscreen systems and we offer as an alternative our pre-built apparatus, Apex, and primate software suite, ApeTouch, both of which are tailored for use in a zoo setting. The efficacy and utility of these tools are demonstrated in a training study with four macaque groups of different species that were previously naïve to touchscreens. All of the groups in the study learned to use the device and displayed a consistent engagement with the touchscreen tasks over 95 daily sessions of exposure. In the final stage of the training, two of the four groups displayed an above-chance level performance on a numerical sequencing task.

Use of Augmentative Interspecies Communication devices in animal language studies: A review

“…Termed animal computer interfaces (ACI), such devices are similar to AIC devices in that they are apparatuses consisting of symbols to be selected by an animal subject, but instead often function more like vending machines in that they do not necessarily require two‐way interaction (Mancini, 2011). Such technology has been designed with the aim to improve and/or augment the welfare of captive animals (e.g., on farms; in zoos/aquaria; in homes; Westerlaken & Gualeni, 2014; Wirman, 2014), by offering environmental control and/or source of entertainment (e.g., in sea lions, Winship et al, 2023; in primates, Martin et al, 2022). For example, Reiss and McCowan (1993) trained captive dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus ) to socially request desired objects or activities from humans through buttons on an underwater keyboard, and found subjects' engagement marked by contextually appropriate, spontaneous vocal imitation of the computer‐generated whistles accompanying the symbols (Figure 1d).…”

Familiarity mediates apes' attentional biases toward human faces

“…Across all three experiments, described in detail below and in the electronic supplementary material, our general approach to testing the subjects remained consistent. We tested all subjects using 10-point 55 cm capacitive ViewSonic LCD touchscreen monitors (1920 × 1080 resolution) using Zenrichment ApeTouch software v. 14.4 [50]. We used the dot-probe attentional bias paradigm [40] for all three experiments in this study.…”

Lab cognition going wild: Implementing a new portable touchscreen system in vervet monkeys

“…In recent years, while many experiments have been done to quantify both within and between‐species differences in cognition, most have been conducted in captive environments such as zoos (see Hopper, 2017 for review) or laboratories, with relatively few conducted in the wild (Martin et al, 2022; Pritchard et al, 2016). In captivity, researchers can control environmental factors, animals can be isolated from the rest of the group, and can be sampled based on individual characteristics.…”

“…Touchscreens have been used in captivity to examine cognitive processes including memory, decision making, associative and reversal learning, and collaboration (Egelkamp & Ross, 2019). There are already many examples of cognitive testing using touchscreens in captive primates (Martin et al, 2022). For example, touchscreens have been used to test working memory in captive chimpanzees (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007; Kawai & Matsuzawa, 2000), risk‐taking in chimpanzees, gorillas Gorilla gorilla gorilla and Japanese macaques Macaca fuscata (Leinwand et al, 2020) and in‐group recognition in capuchin monkeys Sapajus apella (Pokorny & de Waal, 2009).…”