Japanese

25th Oct, 2009

An Open Lecture, "Developmental Research on Chimps and their Daily Lives", was held in Primate Research Institute (PRI).

The 19th Annual PRI Open Lectures took place on 25th Oct, 2009 with an audience of 60 people, mainly neighboring inhabitants of PRI.
After introductory greetings by Pr. Matsuzawa, Director of PRI, this year's lecture was entitled "Developmental Research on Chimps and their Daily Lives" by Instructor Misato Hayashi, Section of Language & Intelligence, and was about the chimps' substantial learning performances in PRI. The audience actively asked questions such as "how long can they live?"
After the lecture, the audience visited the chimps' 15 m high Triple Tower, Japanese macaques held in cages, and the PRI primate museum and Information Center, consisting of fossil and skeletal collections, for each of which detailed explanations were provided by Instr. Hayashi, Pr. Takeshi Furuichi, Section of Social systems Evolution, and Instr. Toshio Mouri, Section of Evolutionary Morphology. Many children and adults also had their first experience with the Touch Panel used in the chimps' learning challenges during the experiments conducted in the Department of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It looked like they were by turns glad and sad with their results, compared to the chimps'.