May I Have Your Attention Please?

This is Week 3 at Duke Lemur Center. I had big things planned for this week in my "Things Raymond Wants To Accomplish" list. In reality, it is far more mundane. Not an animal trainer myself (not applied, anyway), but I had thought that training lemurs would be a much quicker endeavor than teaching snails to spell out "YASSS MAMA". Apparently not.

Within the subjects that I am working with, it seems that most of them will take a long time to train. I have lucked out that a pair of lemurs I am working with learned really fast and had gotten a grasp of what I want them to do in my trials. Most of them, not so much. There is a pair of lemurs that I have been training for 2 weeks and they are still learning that the black box inside the enclosure gives them a delicious treat. They still hiss and growl at the box though, and often times will mind their business before returning to the box expecting to find treats.

I wouldn't say I am frustrated because frustration is a useless emotion and useless things are, well, useless. I'll have to say that I sorta expected this and I have already drafted a back up plan before I even fly down here. Back up plan aside, I notice that most of the downtime when I'm training these lemurs is to get them to pay attention.

My initial fear with this experiment was that the lemurs will not be interested in apparatus. However, it isn't so. Each subject's first session with the apparatus was them running towards the box to investigate. Getting them to sustain their attention to the task at hand is the problem. Some of these lemurs would sniff around the box, sit on top of it, run up and around the enclosure before sitting in front of the box for a few seconds (that's the time when I have to positively reinforce them) before moving away again. Training them to associate looking at the box for a food reward seems to be hard enough, let alone reinforcing them that eventually they have to touch the box for a food reward. I find myself oftentimes dispensing food reward just to attract them to come back to the box. But if you want your food reward, you HAVE TO ACTUALLY DO THINGS!

Back to the grind tomorrow ... with hope.

I JUST WANT TO FLY BACK TO DURHAM!

I went home to NYC over the weekend to spend time with my husband and my cats. I was supposed to fly back to Durham, NC on Sunday evening but due to severe thunderstorms, my flight was delayed for a few hours and then eventually canceled. I had to rebook my flight out of NYC on Monday morning from JFK. Due to on going construction, JFK only has one active runway so I spent quite some time on the tarmac waiting to fly out.

Dat line to fly out of JFK doe ...

Due to the delays, I missed my day at Duke Lemur Center today. No training. No data collection. I wanted to go to Duke Lemur Center directly from RDU but I got there around 11 AM and I would be at Duke Lemur Center after noon. Besides, I didn't get a good night sleep so I've decided to just head back to the hotel. I don't want to work with animals when I am tired. You always have to be on your toes and give it your 100% when dealing with animals, not only for your own sake but also for the animals. I don't want to forsake my safety as well as the safety of the animals I work with just because I don't want to miss a day. Learning to let go is a virtue. o[ʘ‿ʘ]o

Whole craisins from Southern Season.

So far, I was only able to find "whole craisins" at Southern Season. So, I went there again today to restock on craisins. What? You mean you don't give your subjects gourmet craisins? I've talked about why I needed this specific type as food reward in my previous post.

Week 2: Lemur Training

My lemurs are learning. Some of them are learning fast and some of them are barely getting a hang of it. I have already started testing phase with two lemurs because they have learned to use the apparatus. Any progress is good progress, I guess.

I understand that not all lemurs will have the same performance rate and I accept the fact that some may never learn. My biggest fear is that I will have a small sample size and that all of them are dichromats.

I flew back to NYC for the weekend to see my husband and cats. I have missed them very much. I am grateful that I am about an hour away by plane and I can fly back to see them whenever I want.

Looking forward to work with new individuals next week. It's always interesting to see how they explore a novel object (my apparatus) and how they respond to it.

Raymond Vagell: Current Research

My master’s thesis project is on color vision in ruffed lemurs (Varecia spp.) with Dr. Andrea Baden. My research project will be conducted at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina, where I will be training and running behavioral trials. Using multi-field approaches, I am trying to answer my research questions by incorporating computer programming, robotics, psychophysics, and animal training. I built a subject-mediated automatic remote testing apparatus (SMARTA) to test the Varecia spp. that I will train subjects to use before running trials to test whether they can perceive and discriminate the color red. I will also take blood samples from my subjects to extract genomic DNA for genetic analyses in the Primate Molecular Ecology Lab (PMEL) at Hunter College. I hope that this research can further elucidate whether color vision genotypes in Varecia spp. are expressed phenotypically.

The Usability Of My Apparatus

You don't really hear about "usability" when talking about animal researcher as well as animal enrichment. Usability is the ease and learnability of human-made objects. Much is known and researched on when it comes to the usability of human-made objects intended for humans. Take for example, the usability of a door. Doors with a handle is instinctually something you pull. Doors without a handle but a flat metal plate is instinctually something you push. But how do we arrive to that conclusion?

Doors with handles. Do you push or pull? Why?

It's all about usability research and a lot of testing on potential subjects. You gather as many relevant info as you can, use those knowledge to build an object and then have your subjects use those objects while you observe them. This is how you would test your prototype. I wasn't lucky enough to test the usability of my apparatus with the ruffed lemurs before I brought the apparatus down to Duke Lemur Center. However, I have enough data to help me designing and execute my apparatus. Information such as their height when sitting on the ground, what height is their eye level, as well as the best way to stop these lemurs from perching on the apparatus so that they do not pee or poo on the apparatus.

SPOILER ALERT: They are still perching on the apparatus but they are considerate enough to not pee or poo on it ... yet.

However, watching these lemurs use my apparatus for the past 2 weeks has given me valuable information. There are some many variables that go into play on how they learn and utilize my apparatus. Differences in ages and amongst individuals are evident. I won't divulge more into this, but I think it is something interesting to look into as well as important for animal enrichments.

Some of you might be wondering. How do I know this? Well, someone very close to my life is a usability researcher so naturally I have inherited some advice and knowledge from him.