Mackenzie Webster, Ph.D.

• Associate Professor
• Department of Psychology
• Loyola University

The Challenge of Inferring Cognitive Processes in Primates

A central challenge in comparative cognition is inferring underlying mechanisms from behavioral outcomes. In this talk I will discuss two lines of recent research that challenge typical assumptions about the underlying mechanisms behind task success primates. First, work with aphantasic humans shows that despite lacking visual imagery, aphantasics perform most visual memory tasks as well as typical individuals. While it is often assumed that animals might be particularly dependent on visual imagery, these findings raise the possibility that animals may also solve these tasks differently than we thought. Using a novel pupillometry measure, we looked for evidence of imagery in rhesus monkeys across a series of tasks. Our initial findings do not provide strong evidence for imagery-based solutions. A second surprising finding comes from our comparative work with great apes. Familiarity-based recognition is often assumed to be an evolutionarily ancient and widely shared process, particularly among closely related species such as orangutans. Yet our work finds that orangutans consistently fail to demonstrate familiarity, even when it appears to be the only solution, instead relying on more cognitively demanding working memory processes. These studies provide surprising examples of when our standard assumptions may not hold, highlighting the critical need for methods that can dissociate behavioral success from the processes that produce it.

Faculty Host: Dr. Christopher Krupenye