Observing Primate Caregivers

This book aims to advance our understanding of the caregiver-infant interaction in primates and its effect on the development of social cognition, working from an interdisciplinary approach (i.e., psychology, philosophy, and anthropology), challenging the dominant cognitivist perspectives and methodologies. This book is important because it contributes to understanding how primate parent-and-infant interaction works and how it affects the infant’s development. Understanding this parent-and-infant interaction contributes to finding better ways to support human parents and provide better care for non-human primate mothers and infants in captivity.

Part 1. Before Africa.- 1. Primate Caregivers and Infants: Three key Ideas.- 2. Designing a Study: What a Researcher’s Choices Reveal About Their Presuppositions on Communication.- Part 2. In the Field.- 3. Experiencing the Wild.- 4. It is not That Simple: There is Variation we Must Account for.- Part 3. The Aftermath.- 5. The Importance of Touch.- 6. How to Interpret Touch.- 7. Moral Consequences.

Dr. Maria Botero is a Professor in the Psychology & Philosophy Department at SHSU. As evident in her publications and research grants, her academic research focuses on animal cognition and ethics. The time she spent at Gombe National Park, Tanzania (Africa), observing chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) from the Kasekela community, shaped the way she views the primate mind, communication in human and non-human animals, and the methods used to study social cognition.  Most recently she has developed a dog cognition lab to study the relationship between anxiety and the performance of cognitive tasks in dogs.