Sarah L. Jacobson

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Postdoc at The Graduate Center, CUNY

While African savanna and Asian elephants split between 4.2-9 MYA, they are often regarded as one united group, ‘elephants,’ even in the scientific literature. This is concerning, as while both are keystone species in their respective habitats, each face different environmental pressures and have rarely been compared experimentally. Savanna elephan...

An animal’s capacity for innovation ¬or solving novel problems likely has important implications for how quickly they can adapt to environmental change. Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) living in zoos have previously demonstrated a capacity to innovate, but problem solving has never been studied experimentally in a wild elephant population. We ins...

Humans are unique in their sophisticated culture and societal structures, their complex languages, and their extensive tool use. According to the human self-domestication hypothesis, this unique set of traits may be the result of an evolutionary process of self-induced domestication, in which humans evolved to be less aggressive and more cooperativ...

Regular monitoring of wild animal populations through the collection of behavioral and demographic data is critical for the conservation of endangered species. Identifying individual Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus ), for example, can contribute to our understanding of their social dynamics and foraging behavior, as well as to human-elephant conf...

Simple Summary A survey was sent to zoos, research facilities, and sanctuaries which housed chimpanzees. The behavioral profiles of 1122 chimpanzees were collected for this survey. Data collected included information about the animals’ age, sex, social group size, rearing history, and enclosure as well as information about each animal’s behavior. E...

While researchers interested in the evolution of human intelligence have traditionally focused on the psychology of other primates, a growing field aims to understand how similar cognitive abilities emerge in evolutionarily distant taxa. Here, we briefly review what we know, and why we do not know more, about the ‘mind’ of one such animal — the ele...

Innovative problem solving is considered a hallmark measure of behavioral flexibility as it describes behavior by which an animal manipulates its environment in a novel way to reach a goal. Elephants are a highly social taxa that have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adapting to changing environments. To understand how individual differences...

Simple Summary Elephants have a unique sensory perspective of the world, using their complex olfactory and auditory systems to make foraging and social decisions. All three species of elephants are endangered and inhabit environments, which are being affected rapidly by human development. Anthropogenic disturbances can have significant effects on e...

Camera traps provide a virtual window into the natural world of wild animals, as they provide a noninvasive way to capture anatomical and behavioral information. Regular monitoring of wild populations through the collection of behavioral and demographic data is critical for the conservation of endangered species like the Asian elephant (Elephas max...

Innovative problem solving is considered a hallmark measure of behavioral flexibility as it describes behavior by which an animal uses previous experience to manipulate its environment to reach a goal. Elephants are a highly social taxa known for their ability to adapt to volatile environments. While innovation has been observed in elephants, one q...

Simple Summary As animals cannot tell us how they feel, we must develop tests to make inferences about how they are feeling to assess their welfare. Here, we adapted a task that has been previously used with humans and chimpanzees to assess how chimpanzees, gorillas, and Japanese macaques respond to pictures of different emotional valences. Specifi...

Primates' food preferences are typically assessed under conditions of certainty. To increase ecological validity, and to explore primates' decision making from a comparative perspective, we tested three primate species (Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla gorilla, Macaca fuscata) (N = 18) in two food-preference tests that created different conditions...

Cognitive flexibility allows individuals to adapt to novel situations. However, this ability appears to develop slowly over the first few years of life, mediated by task complexity and opacity. We used a physically simple novel task, previously tested with nonhuman primates, to explore the development of flexible problem solving in 2-, 3-, and 4-ye...

In the original version of our methods, we incorrectly stated the size of the Japanese macaques’ exhibit at Lincoln Park Zoo.

The three living species of elephants (Elephas maximus, Loxodonta africana, L. cyclotis) have evolved adaptive, sensory perceptual abilities to successfully navigate the physical and social environments in which they live. In this article, we review research evaluating the sensory perception of elephants across four sensory modalities—vision, audit...

Understanding captive animals’ preferences is important for their care and management. However, pairwise testing for preference can be time consuming, open to bias, and typically restricted to stimuli that can be presented manually. We tested the efficacy of using touchscreens to test zoo-housed primates’ food preferences and evaluated the primates...

Using methods comparable to those used previously to test closely related taxa (Pan troglodytes and Macaca mulatta), our aim was to better understand how gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and Japanese macaques (M. fuscata) learn sequences. Using a disappearing-type simultaneous chain, we trained 5 gorillas and 8 macaques on a 2-item list of color...

Cognitive testing programs are being implemented more frequently in zoo settings due to the benefits these programs can provide for the animals, researchers and zoo visitors. However, the impact that cognitive studies have on the welfare of captive animals, particularly for primates in a social group, is debated. Although cognitive testing can be...

In contrast to reports of wild primates, studies of captive primates' flexibility often reveal conservatism: individuals are unable to switch to new and more efficient strategies when task demands change. We propose that such conservatism might be a result of task design and hypothesize that conservatism might be linked to primates' lack of causal...

In the zoo environment, anthropogenic noise is common as sound levels fluctuate due to visitors, construction, habitat design, and special events. In this study, changes in the mood of three species of zoo-housed primates in response to a loud annual event were evaluated with the response-slowing paradigm. In this paradigm, animals experiencing anx...

Experiences during early development are influential on the lives of human and non-human primates into adulthood. The population of captive chimpanzees in the USA can provide insight into this relationship, as collectively they have experienced a wide range of exposure to both conspecifics (those raised in natal groups) and humans (those raised as...

Background Studying animal cognition in a social setting is associated with practical and statistical challenges. However, conducting cognitive research without disturbing species-typical social groups can increase ecological validity, minimize distress, and improve animal welfare. Here, we review the existing literature on cognitive research run w...

PRISMA (2009) Checklist for Systematic Reviews

Published experiments of primate cognition in a social setting (2000-2015) The publications that reported tests of primate cognition in a social setting published between 2000 and 2015 (inclusive), sorted by species, with one entry per unique combination of environment type and species per publication.

Zoo-housed animals are provided with many temporary elements in their exhibit, such as environmental enrichment devices (EEDs), which may not match the aesthetic of their exhibit. Some zoos object to the use of artificial EEDs in naturalistic exhibits, but there has been little research into whether the appearance of these temporary elements influe...

Behavioral assessment is an essential element of captive chimpanzee care. A survey was designed to collect a variety of behavioral measures on captive chimpanzees including questions about early rearing, current social group, features of enclosures, and the presence of species-typical and abnormal behaviors. The survey can be completed based on qua...

Annually, over 180 million people visit zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), giving them the chance to see a variety of primate species and to learn about their behavior and ecology. In the past decade, some zoos have also become increasingly involved in conducting high-quality cognitive research that not only contributes...

Collecting behavioral data is an essential element of monitoring the welfare of captive chimpanzees no matter where they live, and any comparisons between the varying sites in which chimpanzees live should be based on objectively-collected data. Information collected as a part of standard monitoring programs in chimpanzee facilities was collated th...

Abnormal behaviors in captive animals are generally defined as behaviors that are atypical for the species and are often considered to be indicators of poor welfare. Although some abnormal behaviors have been empirically linked to conditions related to elevated stress and compromised welfare in primates, others have little or no evidence on which t...

Annually, over 180 million people visit zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), giving them the chance to see a variety of primate species and to learn about their behavior and ecology. In the past decade, some zoos have also become increasingly involved in conducting high-quality cognitive research that not only contributes...

Raw survey data.

Coprophagy (ingestion of feces) is typically classified as an abnormal behavior for captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) primarily because, although observed among wild chimpanzees, it is performed at higher frequencies by the captive population. Categorizing all abnormal behaviors together, however, ignores potential variation, limiting our abili...