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Steve Ross, supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research at the Lester E.
Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, explains it wasn’t
originally his idea to co-organize the Mind of the Chimpanzee Conference
taking place at the zoo March 22–25, 2007. Instead, it was more a matter of
history.
Twenty years ago, the Understanding Chimpanzees Conference, one of the first
to gather experts on chimpanzee behavior and cognition to share their
research, was held at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, now the site of the
zoo’s Laflin Memorial administrative building. Ten years later a follow-up
conference was held at the same spot, this time focusing on chimpanzee
culture. This fall, as the two-decade mark neared, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, one of
the founding fathers of ape cognitive research, began dropping hints about
another conference.
“Matsuzawa was visiting Chicago, and he mentioned to Fisher Center Director
Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Ph.D., and me that with the 20th anniversary of the
first conference approaching, it would be nice for another meeting to take
place. Before too long,” Ross laughs, “he’d talked us into organizing it.”
Working through the Fisher Center, the two scientists quickly found that
preparing for the Mind of the Chimpanzee Conference required work ranging
from the nuts-and-bolts tasks of arranging catering and securing chairs to
the more involved work of selecting chimpanzee experts to serve as hosts and
speakers. The latter entailed a bit of a balancing act. As Lonsdorf
explains, “For the conference to work, we knew that we had to find the right
blend of speakers. It was important to have representatives from both field
and captive-research settings. We also wanted a mixture of established
researchers—Frans de Waal, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Andrew Whiten—and
up-and-coming scientists that could be filling the same roles in 20 years.”
A steering committee helped narrow the list of candidates to 30 individuals,
some of whose research can be seen following this feature.
The breadth of topics scheduled to be discussed reflects the depth of
chimpanzees’ cognitive capabilities. “Chimpanzees need advanced cognitive
abilities to navigate their complex social environments,” explains Lonsdorf. “They live in large, multigender groups, meaning individuals have to
constantly monitor their standing with other group members. Males have to
assess their place in dominance hierarchies and form alliances with other
males to gain dominance and breeding opportunities. They’re a highly
territorial species, meaning they need the ability to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Finally, chimpanzees are foragers, meaning they probably
need to form mental maps of their area, remembering when fruits are about to
ripen or when leaves may be ready for eating.”
The richness of chimpanzee social lives, coupled with the species’ close
genetic relationship to our own, has made for a fertile and fascinating
field of research.
Next: Working at the Forefront
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