Cayo Santiago

Current Studies on Cayo Santiago

Dr. Marc Hauser:
Professor, Harvard University, Department of Psychology: For over 10 years Dr. Marc Hauser and his students have been investigating various features of cognition and communication, including spontaneous numerical abilities in primates and the evolution of vocal communication in primates.

Dr. Laurie Santos:
Assistant Professor: Yale University, Department of Psychology. Dr. Santos's current investigations seek to elucidate what monkeys understand about animate objects and their motions, and how they use such information to count the number of objects. She also is researching how the direction of visual attention can serve as a predictor of both an individual's future behaviors and intentions. Specifically, she is studying the significance of eye gaze in rhesus macaques and how monkeys use such information when foraging for food. Her studies contribute to a larger body of work examining cognitive capacity and theory of mind in primates.

Dr. Dario Maestripieri:
Professor: University of Chicago, Behavioral Biology Laboratory. Dr. Maestripieri's research interests are in neuroendocrinological, ecological, and evolutionary aspects of social behavior. His current research focuses on the behavioral and physiological aspects of development, reproduction and aging in rhesus macaques. One of his main interest is to understand how early social experience and rank, influences the development of reactivity to stress, adult behavior and reproduction, and health and disease processes.

Dr. Anja Widdig:
Head of the Junior Research Group of Primate Kin Selection, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. Dr. Widdig's research explores the mechanisms of paternal kin discrimination. Her study looks into the development of paternal kin bias in social behavior by observing the animals since infancy and genotyping the animals to confirm paternal relatedness.