week 4= hierarchy
This week we started hierarchy observations. We are observing the chimps and recording their social interactions (east, west and outside) every weekday from 9:00 to about 5:30. For the first hour after they are let out of the night enclosures, we observe for the entire hour, then from 10:00 to noon and from 1:00 to 4:30, we observe them for 15 minutes at the top of every hour. Everyone is asked to sign up for 6 15-minute shifts per week and two people are supposed to be assigned to each shift, so that both indoor and outdoor areas are covered. This week some of us ended up doing more shifts, since I think close to half of the apprentices have still not managed to pass their reliability tests. The observations are usually a lot of fun though and I don’t really mind the extra shifts, other than having to head in early or stay well past my normal cleaning shifts when there really isn’t much to do between observations. I am actually signed up for 4 observations in a row on Monday morning. We also observe the chimps every day at dinner, which starts at around 4:30 and usually lasts about an hour. The two practice sessions I did this past week were crazy! Trying to record all the interactions that occur, especially between humans and chimps is nuts, but it is exciting to get to watch while the chimps are served dinner. I don't exactly feel ready to do a dinner observation, but the project managers say to go ahead. I get to observe at least 2 dinnertime sessions this summer.
Hierarchy was actually complicated a little by painting this week. Some of the paint in the enclosures is starting to chip and peel, so someone has been coming in to touch up some of the walls. This includes some of the murals on the walls, which unfortunately are just being painted over with white or yellow, with no plans of replacing them anytime soon (money is short of course and colored paint and sealer is expensive). This complicates hierarchy because sometimes the chimps are confined to particular enclosures and therefore one observer has no one to observe. This can happen anyway if no chimps choose to be in a particular area, but it’s a little annoying to come in for a shift and find out you don’t need to be there at all.
What else…recruitment for the art study continues. We are now resorting to calling professors who failed to respond to emails to get more classes to try to pull participants from. We have had a high number of no shows, which is frustrating. All I can say is I’m glad this research isn’t for a grade and I’m glad I’m not responsible for the design of the human testing. Truthfully, it seems like the sign up process was rather poorly designed. We have a limited number of slots each session (only 4) and only one session everyday. Two slots are posted on a sign up sheet in the psychology building and the other two are on a sheet that gets passed around at each class recruitment. Participants are asked to put their name on the sign up sheet and tear off a small reminder slip at each recruiting session. I doubt that anyone goes to the psychology building to sign up, but if they do, they do not get a reminder. We also have no way to contact people to remind them to show up. I think we usually have about 3 out of 4 slots filled and it sounds like only about 50 percent of participants tend to actually show up. Changing procedure at this point would be difficult because we are working with human participants and this would require writing up a new protocol and submitting it for approval to a research ethics committee.
I am also helping one of the grad students with prep work for her thesis. We are cropping videos clips of chimps signing and blurring out the humans so that people can watch the clips later and determine if the chimps sign more clearly when they are interacting with familiar humans versus unfamiliar ones. The work is pretty straight forward, though getting used to working in Final Cut Pro was a little bit of a challenge. Trying to isolate the signs and blur out the people can be a little difficult, but so far I'm the only one of the apprentices who agreed to help that has managed to figure it out and do any of the work, so I don't feel too bad about skipping a few clips until I get a consult from the grad student. She was on vacation last week, but should be back on Monday.
Today was my first official day as a docent. I had shadowed in the past, but today I got to sign people in all by myself! It was so exciting! Actually, I enjoyed last weekend’s docenting better, since we got to interact a bit with Loulis. If the liason decides it is ok, the docents all get to go into the observation area while the chimposium presentations are going on and spend some time with the chimps. Loulis was interested and we all got to take turns going up to the glass to interact. He mostly spent the time pointing at things and usually seemed to request people (or people’s shoes) that were not at the glass, no matter who it was who was visiting. It was still fun, as we got to sign to him and try to elicit play with facial expressions. He also gave one of the liaisons a kiss after she requested it. This week we were short staffed and so unfortunately we did not get to visit with the chimps other than to go in along with the chimposium guests. I should get a couple more opportunities when I docent again later in the summer.
That’s it for week 4. Half over already?! Wow!