Study finds that monkeys, like people, can 'choke under pressure'
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Being stressed about doing well on a test might not be limited to humans, according to a new study led by researchers at Georgia State University.
Researchers say the study, which involved tufted capuchin monkeys living in groups at Georgia State's Language Research Center, is the first to specifically explore whether other species experience pressure to perform.
The monkeys were given a computerized matching task. Some trials were cued to be harder, with a higher possible reward and a timeout consequence for wrong answers, while other trials were typical in difficulty to their usual computer tasks.
The team found that there was significant variation in how individual monkeys responded to these trials when the difference in difficulty was removed, suggesting that for some monkeys the cues of high stakes were enough to impact performance.
"There are several different explanations for why humans might 'choke' or 'thrive' under pressure, but all of these explanations have traditionally considered this sensitivity to pressure to be a human-specific trait," said the study's lead author, Georgia State Ph.D. candidate Meg Sosnowski.
"Our new results provide the first evidence that other species also might be susceptible to this influence of pressure, and that our responses to that pressure are, in part, the result of individual variation in an evolutionarily common stress response."
The researchers also found that higher levels of a naturally occurring biomarker of stress, cortisol, were related to the monkeys' performance. Higher levels of cortisol were associated with a lower ability to successfully complete the high-pressure trials, providing evidence that an individual's long-term stress state might be related to cognitive performance.
"This opens the door not just to explore how responses to pressure might have impacted the evolution of cognition, but also provides clues pointing us to potential avenues that might mitigate performance deficits, both in humans and in other species," Sosnowski said.
The research team included Marcela Benítez, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University, and Sarah Brosnan, who is affiliated with Georgia State's Department of Psychology and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.
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What is your dog's lifespan? You might be surprised
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How old is your dog in human years? And what factors contribute to a long and healthy life for a dog?
For years, it's been generally accepted that "dog years" are roughly human years times seven—that a 1-year-old puppy is like a 7-year-old child, and an 11-year-old elderly dog is like a 77-year-old senior citizen. But it's actually much more complicated, say experts.
Part of the problem is that while humans have clear metrics for healthy aging, little is known about "normal aging" for our four-legged friends. Big dogs tend to age the fastest—maybe 10 times faster than humans—while little breeds may live to be 20 years old, with "dog years" about five times human years.
The Dog Aging Project, founded in 2018, is by far the most ambitious project tackling the question of canine longevity, enrolling and studying tens of thousands of dogs of all sizes, breeds, and backgrounds to develop a thorough understanding of canine aging. Their open-source dataset will give veterinarians and scientists the tools to assess how well a specific dog is aging and will set the stage for further research into healthy aging—in both dogs and people.
The researchers detailed their project and its potential implications for both human and veterinary medicine in an article published in the current issue of the journal Nature. One of their most intriguing avenues of inquiry will analyze the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs, the "super-centenarians" of the dog world.
"This is a very large, ambitious, wildly interdisciplinary project that has the potential to be a powerful resource for the broader scientific community," said Joshua Akey, a professor in Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a member of the Dog Aging Project's research team. "Personally, I find this project exciting because I think it will improve dog, and ultimately, human health."
"We are sequencing the genomes of 10,000 dogs," Akey said. "This will be one of the largest genetics data sets ever produced for dogs, and it will be a powerful resource not only to understand the role of genetics in aging, but also to answer more fundamental questions about the evolutionary history and domestication of dogs."
The Dog Aging Project (DAP) expects to run for at least 10 years. To date, more than 32,000 dogs have joined the "DAP Pack," as the researchers call their canine citizen scientists.
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