Publications by authors named "Cinzia Trapanese"
Article Synopsis
- Foraging in changing environments is complex, and larger brains are often tied to fruit-based diets in primates.
- The study examined how three species of semi-free-ranging primates, with varying reliance on fruit, used spatial and temporal cues to locate food during foraging experiments with manipulated food availability.
- Results showed that primates effectively remembered food distribution patterns, demonstrating flexible foraging strategies even when usual cues or seasonal patterns were altered.
Article Synopsis
- Cannibalism is a common behavior in animals, often driven by survival needs like food scarcity or overpopulation, but it can also have drawbacks like spreading diseases and lowering overall health.
- In primates, it can occur alongside infanticide or when mothers eat their deceased infants (known as filial cannibalism).
- This report details the first observed case of infant cannibalism in brown capuchin monkeys, where a mother and her surviving child consumed parts of a stillborn baby, potentially as a way to recover from the energy loss of pregnancy.
Article Synopsis
- Foraging in seasonal environments poses cognitive challenges for primates, with brain size linked to fruit-based diets.
- This study examined how fruit distribution and preference influenced foraging choices among three primate species with varying frugivorous habits.
- Results showed that primates favored clumped fruit distribution, particularly the more frugivorous species, indicating food type and distribution may play a significant role in cognitive evolution.
Article Synopsis
- Animals need to identify and track specific spatial cues to effectively navigate their environment and locate food, especially in unpredictable settings like tropical forests; this is crucial for primates.
- Various research methods, including direct observations, statistical simulations, and experimental setups, indicate that primates can effectively remember food locations and tend to follow goal-oriented paths to these resources.
- Primates likely create mental maps to optimize their foraging strategies, using landmarks for navigation, but more research is needed to understand how they also track the timing of food availability.
Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the ability to understand others' mental states, endows humans with highly adaptive social skills such as teaching or deceiving.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost experimental paradigms to study visual cognition in humans and non-human species are based on discrimination tasks involving the choice between two or more visual stimuli. To this end, different types of stimuli and procedures for stimuli presentation are used, which highlights the necessity to compare data obtained with different methods. The present study assessed whether, and to what extent, capuchin monkeys' ability to solve a size discrimination problem is influenced by the type of procedure used to present the problem.
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