Good News: I Got The Grant!

You guys! I got some exciting news to share. I'm elated to share with you, my readers, that I am the recipient of Duke Lemur Center's Director's Fund for Fall 2016!

OMG!!! I feel like an adult right now (don't laugh!). 

I submitted a proposal to fund the remainder of the cost of my research project as well as money to build more of my testing apparatus. As some of you might know, this research project has been going on for unexpectedly long. Though, I am not complaining because I am having fun working with the lemurs and the staff at Duke Lemur Center. Special shout out to my team of research assistants. Without them, this project would not be possible.

If you are interested in my ruffed lemur color vision research project and the novel apparatus (SMARTA) that I built for this research, you can read about it on:

Duke Lemur Center Spring 2016 Newsletter: Do You See What I See?

Lemur Conservation Network: On The Ground with Raymond Vagell


Or my academic posters:

SMARTA: Subject-Mediated Automatic Remote Testing Apparatus For Color Vision Discrimination Tasks (Vagell, Vagell, & Baden, 2015)

Novel Skill Acquisition in Ruffed Lemurs (Varecia spp.): Preliminary Data from SMARTA Color Vision Study at Duke Lemur Center (Vagell et al., 2016)

Now off the celebrate!

#IPSASP16 Poster Session

Novel skill acquisition in ruffed lemurs (Varecia spp.): Preliminary Data from SMARTA Color Vision Study at Duke Lemur Center

Raymond Vagell, Vance J. Vagell, Stephanie J. Tepper, Isabel M. Avery, Rachel L. Jacobs, James Gordon, & Andrea L. Baden.

Psychophysical studies are necessary for many questions related to the evolution of primate sensory systems, particularly in primate color vision, but such studies remain limited, especially in many lemur species. This may be in part because lemurs require extensive training to novel procedures. We trained ruffed lemurs (Varecia spp.) on the Subject-Mediated Automatic Remote Testing Apparatus (SMARTA) for a color vision pilot study at Duke Lemur Center from May to November, 2015. 18 animals were initially used but only 5 were trained. We selected animals based on their initial interest in participating and their continued interest across the first 20 sessions. Training time ranged from 42 to 265 minutes, across 32 to 172 sessions. We found no correlation between total training time and age, r(4) = 0.088, p = 0.888, or between number of training sessions and age, r(4) = 0.048, p = 0.940.Furthermore, we found no significant difference between sexes in mean total training time (t(3) = 0.29, p = 0.605) or total number of training sessions (t(3) = 0.243, p = 0.824). While acknowledging our sample size, we found no evidence that training is influenced by age and sex. Although training requires an initial time investment that varies across individual study subjects, the SMARTA helps to eliminate user bias and error, which outweighs the time investment.

A copy of my IPS/ASP 2016 poster (Vagell et al., 2016) can be downloaded here.

If you are interested in SMARTA, a copy of that poster (Vagell, Vagell, & Baden, 2015) can be downloaded here.

I'm presenting my poster at #IPSASP16 tonight

Come hear me talk about training my ruffed lemurs to use SMARTA tonight at the poster session!

I'm at The Joint International Primatological Society & American Society of Primatologists Conference in Chicago this week! #IPSASP16

I'm at IPS/ASP 2016 in Chicago this week! So excited to hear all these talks and to network with everyone.

I will be presenting a poster on training my ruffed lemurs to use SMARTA. The poster will be on Thursday, and I will have a PDF version of it online tomorrow.

If you are interested in SMARTA and my color vision study, you can read about it on:

Duke Lemur Center Spring 2016 Newsletter

Lemur Conservation Network

My ASP poster from last year! (Vagell et al., 2015)

I'm also currently looking for research assistants and am hoping I can find potential candidates at the conference. Know someone that like working with lemurs and are great with technology? Send them my way! Here's the Job Listing.

Please come talk to me at the conference! :)

Summer Time Sadness

I'm still training and collecting data with the ruffed lemurs, more accurately, my assistants are still training and collecting data with the ruffed lemurs. After a minor hiccup with data collection (which I rather not discuss), I am back to square one collecting my color vision data. Unfortunately, all of the lemurs that had previous did testing trials seemed to had forgotten how to use SMARTA so we had to re-train them again. Well, everyone except Halley.

Yes, Halley, the black and white ruffed lemur. My pride and joy Halley. She had last used the SMARTA over 6 months ago and when I set that apparatus right in front of her, she remembered where she had left off. At the moment, Halley and Pandora are currently taking a break from my study because ... THEY GAVE BIRTH OVER A MONTH AGO! Halley gave birth to 2 boys (Cosmo and Astro) while Pandora gave birth to a boy (Kalani) and a girl (Sally).