Serious Gaming or: Taking Gaming Seriously

Speaker:
Paulo Henrique Lopes, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

This event is part of an event series „CASCB Talk“.

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Abstract: Searching for food (foraging) is one of the most important animal behaviors alongside social interaction and decision-making. Such behaviors can be analyzed during a classic patch foraging experiment. Common marmosets, known as Callithrix jacchus are a social new world non-human primate indigenous to Brazil, show a variety of flexible foraging behaviors. To investigate these behaviors in a controlled and quantifiable manner, we designed a social patch foraging experiment with pairs of marmosets. Analyzing those patch foraging experiments, we tracked and preserved the individual identities of marmosets, we analyzed the animals' food preferences, patch residence time, travel time distribution, and movement patterns between patches. Preliminary results show an early food exploratory stage and a tendency to solitary patch residency. Our initial findings contribute to understanding marmosets' behavior, especially the social interaction and decision-making when these animals are foraging. Future plans include: using a variety of modeling approaches to understand the decision strategies marmoset use to socially forage and combining vocalizations to unravel the mechanisms of social signals during foraging.

Bio: I am a PhD student in Bioinformatics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, where I also earned my master's degree in the same field. I like to study animal behavior and have contributed to the investigation of sleep in adult octopuses (Octopus insularis), mostly in data analysis and visualization of the results. Currently, in my PhD, I am analyzing rat brains electrophysiological data and investigating foraging behavior in marmosets.