Exploring Comparative Primate Cognition with Dr. Reggie Gazes and Dr. Ikuma Adachi

Episode Transcript
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Andrew MacIntosh (00:00):
After the tune an interview with Dr Reggie
Gazes of Bucknell University onteaching and scholarship in
comparative primate cognition.
Hey everyone, and welcome backto the primate cast.

(00:36):
I'm your host, andrew Macintoshof Kyoto University's Wildlife
Research Center, and the podcastis brought to you by the Center
for International Collaborationand Advanced Studies in
Primatology at KyotoUniversity's Center for the
Evolutionary Origins of HumanBehavior.
For this episode I sat down inthe studio with Dr Reggie Gazes
and my colleague next door, drIkuma Adachi, to talk about

(00:59):
comparative primate cognition.
Reggie was visiting a researchinstitute with a few
undergraduate students as partof a training and exchange
program hosted by Ikuma in hislab.
Reggie is an associateprofessor of psychology and
animal behavior at BucknellUniversity in Lewisburg,
pennsylvania.
She and Ikuma overlapped astrainees in the lab of Dr Robert

(01:20):
Hampton at the now-named EmeryNational Primate Research Center
.
We had Rob in episode number 20of the podcast for anyone who
might be interested, when wetalked about mental time travel
and metacognition.
Ikuma is on that show as well,along with some other excellent
guests talking about animalcognition.
But in the interview here wefind out how her experiences in
Rob's lab translated intoReggie's own approach to being a

(01:42):
teacher scholar at BucknellUniversity.
I loved her enthusiasm andenergy when she was speaking
about engaging her studentsthrough research and primate
cognition, and I already hadthat sense, actually, from a few
prior interactions and from thefact that she was here in Japan
supporting some undergraduatesin this training opportunity.
So I did something a littleunorthodox I canvassed them for

(02:03):
some questions, and so theinterview itself can be thought
of as a sort of collaborationwith them.
And, wow, did they help me loadthe deck.
So, along with Reggie riffing onBunny the Dog, teaching
students like she trains hermonkeys and, spoiler alert, why
she won't go to karaoke with herstudents here, sorry folks, we

(02:23):
talk at length about the nutsand bolts of doing comparative
cognitive science, andparticularly in the context of
animals in social groups.
In a seminar she did for us atKyoto University, reggie told us
about her studies looking athow different individuals are
better or worse at learningcertain tasks and how these
relate to their social contexts,like what rank they occupy in

(02:44):
the group or how embedded theyare in their social networks.
We'll link to some of those inthe show notes, but these are
the kind of things that wouldreally matter to individual
primates living under naturalconditions.
So it was great hearingReggie's thoughts on how this
type of cognitiveexperimentation was gaining more
and more traction despite itsmany challenges.
Listening to this interview, Ithink you'll come away, as I did

(03:05):
, with the sense that Reggie's areally caring and thoughtful
teacher-scholar and hopefullyyou'll learn a lot from the
various lessons she and Akumashare here.
And hey, her department ishiring, so if you think all this
sounds great and she'd make awonderful colleague, then get in
touch with her.
She provides a few detailstoward the end of the interview,
links again in the show notes.
So I'm really excited to sharethis conversation with all of

(03:26):
you.
So to do that, here are Reggieand Akuma in the studio with
yours truly.
I want to throw like a weirdoff the wall question to you to
get started, which is and I'mnot going to lie, I didn't come
up with this myself, but what'sthe deal with Bunny the Dog?

Reggie Gazes (03:49):
We were just talking about Bunny the Dog, oh
yeah, well, so you know whoBunny the Dog is.

I have no idea who Bunny the Dog is.

Okay, so Bunny the Dog is a very famous TikTok dog
who uses these buttons tocommunicate, so buttons that say
like outside, or bunny, or food, or whatever it happens to be,
and so this has gotten a lot ofpress.
People love watching Bunny theTikTok dog and it comes up in

(04:15):
classes a lot, so animalbehavior courses or comparative
cognition courses, my studentsalways want to talk about Bunny
the Dog and of course it's, youknow, a really interesting
example of one of those caseswhere we have, like this, one
animal doing this thing thatseems so incredible, but we
don't have any of the science totell us exactly what's going on

(04:38):
right.
So, like we don't know howBunny was trained and we don't
have footage of Bunny every dayfor her whole life to know.
You know how much of this is.
We only get to see the one timeshe produces something that
makes sense out of 4,000 timesthey don't make sense.
How much of it is specificreinforcement of sequences,
right, which we know animals cando, and there are some
scientists now who are workingon this question because these

(05:00):
buttons have become highlyavailable.
You can order them on Amazon.
People have their cats usingthem, their dogs using them, so
I know there's some folks in thedog world who are working on
trying to answer these questions, but yeah, it's definitely a
fun topic to get students intoconversations around
communication and training andeven like research methodology,
because it's, yes, kind of fun.

Okay, so I hadn't heard of Bunny, but I do
know and I use a little bit inmy comparative cognition class
the story of Stella the dogwhich is maybe a well better
known example of this, but isthis kind of the same idea?

Yeah, I think it's pretty, yeah, it's, and it's
kind of like speaking to a newgeneration and you know, like
chaser the dog, rico, right?
So these are like very specificone animal who can do this,
like amazing thing, right.
And that always comes up incomparative cognition when
you're thinking about, you know,capacity versus like abilities,
and whether one animal doing athing tells us that that species

(05:56):
has this particular cognitivecapacity, or whether that's
really just like a one-offanecdote, right?
And as they say, the plural ofanecdote is not data, right.
So you know, we need betterstudies to really understand
what's going on.

I think so in addition to Reggie here in the
studio we have Ikuma Natchiagain with us, who's kind of
hosting during this time.
We'll get into that in a second, but I think with the
chimpanzees as well.
Here you have kind of similarstorylines too, like you might
have some what you could callquote unquote savant chimpanzees
out there, and I wonder if youwant to make it a comment on

(06:30):
that as well.

Ikuma Adachi (06:31):
Well, I guess it's really important point brought
by Reggie now, like capacityversus like what is going on as
a species, for example.
I mean both are important lineof studies as far as it's
scientifically approached Iwould say.
So Rico's case or those othersgood examples.
The first things they came isbasically just phenomena.
They seem to have this and thenthe question is whether or not

(06:55):
they actually do that or theyjust happen to show the similar
phenomena by totally differentmechanisms.
So we need to understand whatis behind those behaviors.
People can easily answer more,for it's like oh, I cannot say
that.
You can say thatAnthropomorphize,
anthropomorphize their behaviorand then we try to understand

(07:19):
their behavior based on our owncognition or cognitive systems,
but that's something being yourwrong direction, right?
So scientifically we need toapproach and we need to
understand what is behind.
So in that sense, chimpanzee,yes, we are also often based on
a small number of subjects, butstill we want to take it as a
group as much as we can.
But meanwhile, even if it's alimited example, we want to

(07:41):
understand what they can do as acapacity that they have.
So both question we actuallyare interested in.

So I know dogs .
Reggie is not really your mainson.
He's a species, but I'm kind ofjust to belabor the point a
little bit more, I know thatrecently there's been kind of a
renaissance in research withdogs, particularly in the realm
of cognition, and I wonder, justfrom your perspectives as
comparative cognitive scientists, how do you see that like the
origins of that, and why did itkind of take so long for people

(08:12):
to get really interested in this, given you know how familiar
they are to us?
That's kind of an interesting,I think, development.

Yeah, it is weird actually you're right that it
took so long to get therebecause people are really
interested in dogs.
And then you know the flip sideof that too is very few people
are looking at cats in cognition.
I think in part that's justpractical.
Cats are very difficult to workwith friends that we have that
work with them.
You know it's a struggle butbut you know, these animals that
we spend so much of our dailylives with, we actually don't

(08:41):
know all that much about.
And I think in part the interestin dog cognition now of course
it's related to the fact thathumans love dogs and they are
such a part of our lives, but Ithink there's also a lot of
practical reasons why a lot offolks have moved to dogs.
It's becoming increasinglydifficult to do research with
primates in captivity and to getaccess to to any animals right.

(09:03):
It's very expensive.
A lot of facilities areshutting down and so looking for
study species that you canaccess easily that are of
interest from either anevolutionary perspective or a
domestication perspective orjust a human welfare and
interaction perspective, youknow dogs are a great option
there.
So I think there's a lot oflayers to why the dog stuff has
gotten so popular lately.

I read, I mean, and also again, we I think we
human sometimes overconfidenceabout we understand their
behavior because they dosomething that you want, yeah,
but again, if you come to theevolution perspective or
domestication perspective, asReggie said, we need to
understand their behavior andmechanism, what make them do

(09:49):
that, so it can be veryinteresting species in that
sense yeah and practical reasontoo.
So that's how the publicattention and scientific
interest can come together.

Yeah, okay, so enough about dogs for dog.
So I want to.
I want to talk a little bitabout why you're here, reggie,
and, and we can hear from you.
Come on that as well.
But so you, you arrived here Ithink it was at maybe the
beginning of July or late June.
You have a contingent ofundergrads as well from Bucknell

(10:26):
University.
You yourself, in the past, wereone of those undergrads at
Bucknell University yeah, sothat might come up as well, but
can you just give us a briefsummary of what you're doing
here?

yeah, so my, there's four undergraduate
students with me on this trip.
We got a grant in 2019 from theAsian Network, which is a
consortium of institutions inthe states that are interested
in promoting the liberal arts inAsia, basically, and so they
have these student facultyfellow grants that you can apply

(10:59):
for, where the students in thefaculty work together to develop
a project to go somewhere inAsia to study something, and so
our project idea at the time waswe have this group of
undergraduate students who workat the primate facility at
Bucknell, so we have a primatelab on campus, which is pretty
unique for a primarilyundergraduate institution, and

(11:20):
all of these students have beenworking there doing research and
obviously taking courses in howwe study animal behavior and
cognition in the states.
But we got really interested inunderstanding a little bit more
about the differences and thesimilarities in how primatology
is studied in Japan, you know,because the history there of
primatology in Japan and in theWest, you know, kind of

(11:42):
developed in parallel for awhile, but independent of one
another, and then came together,and I think there are some some
differences in the wayquestions are asked, in the way
data are interpreted, the waythe animals are treated and the
spaces that we were reallyinterested in exploring, and so
that was.
We were supposed to be here inthe summer of 2020.
For many reasons, that didn'thappen, and we are here now in

(12:04):
the summer of 2023.
So we've been shadowing Ikumastudents, who have been awesome,
showing us around, letting usobserve their experiments and
then also working on developingsome long-term collaborative
ideas that Ikuma and I have beenworking to develop since 2017
probably.

Yeah, to try to get some more exchange
between our students and ourfacilities so I think you can
imagine that we'd be reallyinterested in people's
perceptions of how kind ofscience is being done similarly
and differently in thesedifferent places.
We had formerly Pamela Asquithwas an anthropologist who met a
primatologist, who studied thehistory of primatology and kind

(12:41):
of philosophy of how the scienceis being done in these two
places and she herself spent anumber of or a good amount of
time in Japan observingprimatologists, going to the
field with them and then writingabout these kind of differences
.
But from your perspective, andmaybe on the more comparative
cognition side, what were thekind of things that interested
you most in that respect?

well, yeah, so you know we're focusing pretty much
on comparative cognition,captive, primate kind of
cognitive work, and I think thethings that my students got the
most interested in werebasically the line between
humans and animals right andwhere you draw that line and
which direction do you approachthe science from right?
so when we think about cognitivequestions, there's a few ways

(13:24):
we can approach them right.
So we can come at it fromhumans do this thing.
Do chimpanzees also do thisthing?
Right?
You know, sort of, are we moresimilar than we might think,
right?
And there's a lot of amazingresearch questions that kind of
come out of that perspective.
And then there's also theopposite side of things, which
is, you know, how do animalssolve things?

(13:46):
How do humans solve things?
And often where that lands, you,is that maybe humans aren't as
great as we think they are atcertain things, right, that,
like, we often overcomplicatewhat humans are actually doing
and that it may be a little bitsimpler, and so we've explored
this and read a lot of Westernprimatologists and comparative
psychologists talking aboutthese differences.
But when you look at thehistory of primatology in Japan

(14:08):
and the way that primatologystarted and the amazing ideas of
how to study animals that havecome out of the work in Japan,
like naming animals, right, it'sthis really basic one, but it's
such a different perspective,right?
It implies that these animalsare individuals that have
individual behaviors that arerelevant, that they're part of a

(14:30):
collective group right that acttogether and that that's also
relevant versus kind of theWestern historical tradition of
at least cognitive work, youknow, like Harlow and that where
maybe the animals don't havenames and they're not
particularly interesting.
They're models of something thatyou're asking, and so I think
that was something that ourstudents had a real interest in

(14:50):
was just this perspective oflike animals and the continuum
of animals and humans.

Anecdote on that.
I was just listening recentlyto an interview with John Mitani
on the Talking Gapes podcast,another kind of primatology
adjacent or related podcast, andhe was talking about the
original naming of the Ongogochimpanzees or talking about
Chimp Empire, this Netflixdocumentary, and so they were
originally named after jazzmusicians, I think.
He and David Watts startedresearch and had Ongogo and

(15:20):
eventually they ran out of, Iguess, jazz musicians that they
knew or famous jazz musicians,but so that leads to a different
kind of problem a cognitiveissue that humans might have
about that.
In Japan there are differentsystems, like on Kochima, where
primatology was started in Japan, I think, historically and
certainly now, females are andmales are named differently.

(15:42):
So the females are given plantnames and the males are given
animal names, and that seems tohave been persisting for quite
some time.
I don't know if it's right forme that's really interesting.
Yeah.
And so I wonder yeah, I don'tknow, yukumaf, you know like how
the chimpanzees here were?

named here.
I, you know, I don't know.
Okay, some of them are namedafter the actress.
That's what I know.
I is named after the famousactress on the time, but some of
them actually came with a namealready.
So we don't name everyone,every single individual here,
but I mean for the infant wise,it's clear.

(16:19):
Just, we pick the name startingfrom the same character,
basically from the mother right,so that we can keep track.
You know the lineage, familylineage, based on that Right, I
and I, you move.
Yeah, for example, pan and Paul, yeah.

Chloe and Kuyo .
Yes, yeah, that's our practicetoo.
Yeah, in our lab as well.
Yeah, so how?
Maybe you can talk then aboutthe primate lab that you have at
Bucknell.
Now I think I heard youmentioned that it has kind of an
interesting origin story.

Yeah, if it's accurate.
Yeah, so this is one of thoselike apocryphal things, like
I've never seen it in print soI'm not positive.
It's true, but the story goesthat the reason we have a
primate lab at Bucknell is thatDoug Candlin, who started our
program, was an animalbehaviorist, primatologist.
That he got a call fromCarpenter who had been in Japan

(17:16):
after World War Two doing somework with scientific development
, and that I guess thegovernment of Japan had offered
him as a thank you a troop ofJapanese monkeys.
And he never put them.
So he called Doug and saidwould you take these monkeys?
And he went to the universityand said, hey, would you build
me an enclosure for monkeys?
And that began the whole thing.

(17:37):
Like I said, don't know ifthat's true, but now we don't
have Japanese macaques anymore.
I'm not actually sure whathappened to the original troop.
We have a group of homodryusbaboons, we have a group of
tufted capuchin monkeys and wehave a group of squirrel monkeys
.
So total we have about 50monkeys on campus and they're

(17:57):
involved in teaching.
So our students take courses inthe lab.
We have classrooms there doingbehavioral observations,
cognitive research, and thenthey support the research for
the faculty and for the studentsthere.

Yeah, that's really interesting that
perspective.
So I know a lot of ourperceptions might be that labs
like that primate labs are thereto support the research
activities of the faculty andwhoever collaborators and
students as well graduatestudents but you just mentioned
that they're also an importantteaching tool and I'm not sure

(18:31):
I've heard that so often thatit's as integrated.
So is that really like a focusthen of the department too, so
that this is really an importantteaching opportunity and role
for that place as well?

Yeah, oh yeah, I mean.
So Bucknell it's a primarilyundergraduate institution, which
means like, while we have amaster's degree program, we
don't have PhD students.
We don't really have postdocsto speak of.
There's a few, so the researchthat happens on campus is done
by the undergraduate studentsworking with the faculty, and
the faculty's main job isteaching.

(19:03):
So we teach undergraduatecourses and so integrating our
scholarship into our teaching isa big part of what we do.
And, yeah, so our Bucknell hasan animal behavior major which
is very old I think it's been 55years, maybe longer than that
that the major has been aroundand it's an interdisciplinary

(19:24):
program between the biologydepartment and the psychology
department and it really focuseson behavior and the primates
have just always been a big partof that.
And so our students, like Isaid, take courses in that and
that's very important for usthat they get that kind of
training and experience.
But they're also heavilyinvolved in the lab.
So we have a student trainingteam who works with our primates

(19:45):
doing, like, the husbandrytraining, and that's amazing
because lots of our studentswant to go on to zookeeper work
or animal training stuff, sothey can get that experience as
undergraduate students.
I mean, we have a lot of prevet students that want time
working with students, with theanimals, and then, of course,
the research.
So we have many students, likethe four that are here, that are
interested in the scholarshipside of things too.

Right.

So maybe this, this is something where the two
the two of you, by the wayyou've kind of known each other
for a really long time, right,so we can digress for a second.
You were graduate studentstogether, is that correct?
Or you were a postdoc.
I was a postdoc and you were astudent.

I was a baby grad student.
Yeah, I think it was my secondyear that you got there.
So yeah, we worked together fora few years, right next to each
other in a tiny little lab.

That was in the lab of Rob Hampton.

Yes, yes, At Emory National Primary Research
Center Currently.
Yes, oh, currently it was theAkis National Primary Research
Center.

Right, it changed the name to the Emory, Emory
State National Primary.

Research Center.

I think it's the one Emory Primary Research
Center.

I don't know.
We apologize, Emory, forscrewing that up.

We'll get the show.
We'll get that in the shownotes.
Misrepresent the place, butyeah, we had.
So Rob.
I met Rob.
He came here in 2014 for ananimal psychology conference
that we had in Inuyama thatTetsuro Matsuzawa put on, and he
did a little interview for usfor the primary.
Yes as well, but superinteresting guy and super
fascinating research.
So what?
Maybe both of you can kind ofrefund what you felt the

(21:14):
experience was like working withRob and the kind of
opportunities you had in the lab.
There I read you.
Let's start with you.

It was awesome.
I was Rob's first grad student.
Ben Basil and I were the firsttwo.
We came in together, and thenAkuma was the first postdoc, and
so for a long time the lab wasreally just the three of us and
our research technicians, and wehad just a ton of opportunities
to really do what we wanted.
Yeah, I mean, we got to workwith the Rhesus monkeys in the

(21:43):
lab.
Rob set up sound attenuatingbooths for Akuma's research
projects.
I mean, he supported me in mylike completely insane idea to
set up touchscreens for the bigsocial groups of Rhesus at the
field station, which wassomething I always wanted to do
but never thought I'd get achance to do, and he made it

(22:04):
happen.
And that was amazing.
So, yeah, I think.
And and we got a chance to workat the zoo and meet Sarah
Brosnan, like meet the wholecrew at Georgia State.
We worked really closely withthem too.
So I was really great.

Same here and he's very energetic and sincere in
science, which affect a lot tomy career, I think, and how you
want to operate the lab also.
I learned a lot from him.
Oh, yes, I mean he has nohesitation to spend with the
students I mean spend time withthe students to discuss each
topic and also think about thefuture plan together and he's

(22:42):
always supportive.
So I really learned a lot fromhim and, as Reggie mentioned, he
also helping us to network himwith the people in states and in
Atlanta more specifically, butnot only in the states, sorry,
not only in Atlanta.
Wherever you join a conferencetogether, he's just introducing

(23:03):
people always to you andintroducing you to the old
people.
So that's a really amazingexperience.
I got there.

Yeah, I had that sense he had this kind of
very gregarious nature.
Yeah, yeah, and we really.

I think you know what Akuma just said about like
what we learned from Rob.
You know the methodology andthe careful way of thinking
about data and of making sure torun follow up experiments so
that you're really clear on whatit is that's going on.
I think was something that weall got out of that experience

(23:40):
and has definitely shaped theway that we all ask our research
questions.
Remember, somebody once told methey said Rob Hampton is one of
the only scientists who'sfamous for careful methodology
rather than like excitingfindings, and I really think
that that's like a really goodway to explain it that, like,
you can always trust thatsomething that he says is is

(24:00):
accurate and has been likevetted a thousand times with a
million experiments, and I thinkwe all strive for that based on
that experience.

I think I remember a paper he published
that was in response to thevarious criticisms of this
metacognition work that he'ddone and I think in the, in the
paper, something like we set upthese 11 experiments or
something to follow up all thepotential, and even at the end
of it you know he still soundsvery measured and it's not-
trying to say this is exactlyright, We've you know excluded

(24:30):
all of these other possibilities.
So he's really sincere in thescience, yeah.

Um well, when I was young, young, right after I
start my post, I feel sometimeslike it's too much called, a
little bit tiring, or you know,because I want to just publish
paper but I could never, everreach the agreement.
No, but that helped you a lot,yeah, how to think about data,
how to think about yourmethodology and later on, just I

(24:57):
like it more and more.
And well, to be honest, I wantto do the same way to my
students too.
But, sometimes we still have apressure to like publish paper
and bringing up the major effectfirst and then open to the
whole society to think about it.
That's more excited that I amshifting to, but I'm still.
The way that he approached tothe question is one of the

(25:21):
greatest attitude I have never Ihave ever seen.
Yeah, we admire that You'reright.

We I don't think we ever published a paper with
less than four experiments,which you know as a grad student
is so frustrating becauseyou're like I've done so much
work.
This was like five years ofwork.
It's one paper, but it was likeyou have to tell the whole
story and you have to follow upand it's definitely, yeah, taken
into the way that we all do ourscience now.

And how about the way you do your mentoring?
So now you talked about cominghere to Japan with under.

I mean, I find that story itself fascinating.

You, you have this undergraduate program, and
in the way you talked about itearlier, you made it sound as
well that the undergrads hadthese things, that they were
interested in, not just that,you were telling them they
should be interested in, and soI wonder if you could talk about
that a little bit.
So what is your experienceworking at this primarily
undergraduate institution, whereyou have this private lab doing

(26:12):
cognitive experiments andthey're all part of that while
being trained but also doingsome of the research?

Oh, I mean it's great.
So obviously I chose thatparticular position because I
have an interest in working withundergraduate students.
As you said, I went to Bucknell.
So I was really lucky to workwith Peter Judge, who is the
other primatologist though he'sretiring this year, oh yeah.
So, and he was my mentor when Iwas an undergraduate student

(26:38):
and I mean taught me so muchabout everything right about
animal behavior and experimentsand research questions that let
me then go on to grad schoolright and ask the questions that
I that I was able to ask afterthat, and so I know how valuable
that can be.
So it's been really fun.
I mean, working withundergraduate students is
awesome.
Like they're so enthusiastic,you know they come up with great

(26:59):
experiment ideas.
So many of the coolest thingsthat I've done since getting my
faculty position have beenbecause of undergrads who got
excited about ideas.
So we got started down thispath of looking at cortisol,
particularly in hair cortisol,because Ali Schrock, who is now
a grad student at Duke workingwith Christine Dre, she was

(27:21):
interested in that and she wasworking in my lab and she was
like, could we make that happen?
I don't know, can we?
And so we figured it out Someof the social networking stuff
that we do.
That was really driven byMeredith Lutz, who is a PhD
student now at UC Davis, who wasjust really interested in
networking and figured out howto set it up for the lab and
taught the rest of us and we allkind of like ran from there.

(27:41):
So, like you know, it's justlike having grad students really
like they drive a lot of thecool questions that you get to
ask and take you in directionsyou never thought you'd go, and
it's also kind of fun becauseyou get to help them make some
life decisions.
The sad part is most of themdon't end up going into science.
You know, I think like youtrain PhD students, a lot of
them will kind of stay in thesciences.
So you don't always get to seethem again, you know, at your

(28:04):
professional meetings and things, but it's fun.

But how do you , how do you approach that then?
Because I think maybe for us atprimarily research institutions
, where we mostly interact withgraduate students, I think a lot
of times the expectation is, asyou say, that at least a large
proportion of folks who kind ofare invested in the idea of
staying in the academy to somedegree.
I think that's changing andobviously the competition for
jobs is such that it'sunrealistic to expect that

(28:29):
everybody's going to have thatpath, and nor should they.
I mean, I think we should maybestop having that expectation
that people must do a PhD tobecome a professor.
There are many other reasonswhy you might want to do that,
but do you feel like you have totake a different approach with
undergrad?
Or how do you then help themsee, through working with you

(28:50):
and working in a primatology lab, the other kind of skill sets
they're building that they canuse towards whatever future
career they might have?

Yeah, you know it's a good question.
I think it varies student tostudent, right.
But we're at a liberal artsinstitution.
We very heavily push the ideathat, like, having a well
rounded education is just goingto make you qualified to go out
into the real world and get ajob and have a life right, and
being a competent Interpreter ofscience is just part of that

(29:21):
right.
And so I mean I know you sharethe interest in science
communication, right?
So I've always been interestedin science communication in some
ways.
There's no better way to dothat than to teach people how to
interpret science right,because when you do it yourself,
then you go out and you seesome news piece 10 years after
you graduate, when you're aninvestment banker, you know you
know how to say, like, I'm gonnacritically think about this

(29:42):
before I take this for just theface value, right.
So I think a lot of it is justthe mentality of like we are.
We're training people to beHumans who understand
information and understand howto make decisions and how to
evaluate facts, and that's justpart of science in general.
But yeah, other than that, youknow, you just try and get
students who are interested inwhat you do and get them

(30:03):
interested in the questions thatyou're asking, and I think that
usually does it yeah,especially when they're the ones
that came up with.
Of course, like with gradstudents to write, it's a lot of
shaping because you knowstudents come with great ideas,
or big ideas that aren'tnecessarily feasible or that
have already been answered orthat you know.
Just like you could neveranswer, you have to.

(30:24):
You have to shrink thequestions down into little bits
and pieces, but it's that's thefun part, right.

It's a great learning experience.
Yeah, what about you wanna havea heavy in your mind as a goal?
You have to think about how toapproach it, step by step or
part by part.

What about you ?
You can say you, as I mentionedalready, you know we mostly are
dealing with graduate studentshere in the campus university,
but do you have thatconversation to some about?
You know whether folks want tocontinue in academia or not and
what?

I, especially recently, I have never, ever
tried to make them believe thatthey have to be in academia,
because there's so many pathwaysthat they can take by, still
want to encourage them to keepinterested in the science of
these.
And how?
You again, what is yourquestion and what?

(31:19):
How you want to approach it canvary across all people and
students, so it's very difficultfor me to just uniform the idea
.

I don't want to even do that Sure.

And so instead of really teaching them like what
should and what they shouldapproach, but instead I just
more like casting so manyinformation, including general
reading club, for example.
Just grab whatever you areinterested in and share with
other people and discuss inscience and scientific language
too.
Hopefully just it can encouragethem to just, you know, have

(31:53):
their own find first, find theirown interest and dig into that
and also keep the broaderinterest as a scientific, you
know, approaching.
That's what I can try to do now.
The broad interest is soimportant.

It's one of the reasons why psycats started
the in the am a nerds that wehad many years ago.
I know where you know,following nerd night this I
don't know if you know nerdnight, but it's like a,
something that was started inthe United States by some folks
who interested in communication,science, communication with the
art, communication, whatever.
But they organized these eventsat a bar, cafe or something.

(32:26):
You would have a set of speakerson various different topics and
folks would go and have fun,drinks and food and we started
that here in our cafeteria andsome evenings and the idea was
really we don't focus so much onyour academic research field or
studies, but Pick someorganizers organizers, students
from our graduate student body,but like volunteer and just

(32:47):
organize an event open, fewspeakers, maybe the event is on
death, and so you have a fewspeakers talking different
aspects of death.
Maybe the event is on time, andso you know, one of our
organizers brought in a teacherfrom a local international
school from now it was aphysicist to talk about, you
know, relative.
I don't remember exactly whatthe topic was.

It seems like that right, so we have.

The idea is that people can actually spend
time and focus on things thatare not their science but still
have like a bit of an academicbent or you know a way this kind
of we can teach each otherabout the things we're
interested in, and I just thinkthe things like that seem so
valuable, but when especially inthe for graduate students we
tend to specialize so much,that's hard to kind of get

(33:30):
outside of that and realizethese other things that we bring
to the table.
So I guess with undergrad it'sstill a bit different, because
the folks are still quite youngand just really formulating who
they are, who they want to be,and so it's kind of an exciting
time as well.

Yeah, it's almost the opposite.
Like it's, you know, you havegraduate students who are so
focused and so into theirscience, right that that's like
all they think about Withundergraduates when they start
in the lab.
Oftentimes they literally don'tknow anything about the science
right.
They haven't even taken ananimal behavior course or
cognition course, and so you'rereally starting from scratch and
so that can generate somereally cool ideas and questions.

(34:05):
But then you also have to likesort of catch up on the on the
other stuff.
But they definitely have bigbroad interests right that come
from the fact that they're also,like whatever, really involved
in music on campus and, like youknow, taking English classes
and all kinds of cool things.

And maybe it's a good opportunity to
transition more into the scienceand talk about what you're
doing, what you've done andmaybe where your works have
overlapped as well.
So I found a few, I mean justkeywords.
Wise, I know you've worked onkind of similar topics To some
degree.
Kuma, transitivity, I think,reggie, that's something that's
been quite prevalent in yourwork.
Ordering and our kind ofnatural inclinations to order

(34:40):
things.
I think you overlap in there.
So maybe I'll leave it up toyou.
I don't usually do this, butwhere do you want to start
thinking about the kind of workthat you're doing these days?

Oh, that's where it came from.
That's our question, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, the stuff I'mdoing these days, I think, falls
into two major categories.
So you know, I came up in thekind of cognitive and
comparative cognition world andso I ask a lot of questions that
are pretty much pure cognition.
I think he kuma has the samething right about mechanisms of

(35:10):
how animals solve certain tasksand what that means, about how
they think or how they learn orhow they remember information.
But then I also kind of havethis I don't want to say newer
now because I've been doing thisfor a while but another arm of
my work that's more interestedin kind of the intersection
between behavior and cognitionand what's going on in an
animal's daily life, and howdoes that relate to either how

(35:31):
they perform on cognitive tasksor how they're able to learn or
perform on cognitive tasks.
So we kind of these two parallelthings going at the same time.

I think we recently not that recent a few
months ago we had Sarah Brosnanon the podcast and you, kuma,
was in the studio for that aswell, and she mentioned
something that overlaps a lotwith something I heard you say
the other day during yourseminar, which is that sometimes
if you just sit back I'llparaphrase sit back and watch
the animals that you're studyingin their own kind of social

(36:02):
niche, A lot of things kind ofjump out at you or become
apparent, and maybe it was inthe context of talking about
transitivity, which I think weoften think of in the context of
competition, why an animal'sneed to understand to kind of
rank order of other individuals.
But your observation was thatthey don't spend most of their
time doing that right, likebeing competitive or fighting,

(36:25):
or they spend a lot of timeaffiliating, and so I wonder if
maybe, so there's certainly some, I think, general patterns
there, that what happens whenyou kind of watch the animals
that you have access to, and Iwonder if you could talk about
that how that's kind of inspiredthe different questions you've
started to ask.

Yeah, I think that's.
It's definitely been veryinspirational to hang out with
the animals.
So we're lucky at Bucknell thatour primate colonies are housed
in large social groups, butthey're also we're able to
separate them out to test them.
So it's actually kind ofsimilar to the chimpanzees here
at eHub and that's one of thethings actually that we talked

(37:03):
about with my students in cominghere.
Was that actually like theBucknell way of doing things is
pretty unique in the States, butit's actually not that
dissimilar to what's done here.
So there's there's somesimilarities in their
experiences across these twofacilities.
But because we have theseanimals housed in these big
social groups, you know we'reable to look at their behavior
and then we're also able to askthem cognitive questions in

(37:24):
these controlled environments,and so, yeah, we started
spending some time observingthem and that was something that
you know I've always beeninterested in behavior, but I
did my postdoc at Zoo Atlantawith Tara Stowinsky and one of
the things that I really learnedfrom Tara was the value of
behavioral data sets, Like evenwhen you're not sure what you're

(37:44):
going to do with it.
If you are watching youranimals and you're recording
what they're doing and you keepdoing that so many things can be
answered from that data set.
Like it may be 10 years fromnow that you're going to sit
down and look at it, but you,you have all of that information
and and so when I started atBucknell, the first thing we did
was we set up a behavioralobservation program and we just

(38:05):
started observing our animalsall the time and collecting that
data and then looking at it.
It's just been so interestingand so informative and so many
questions have come out of it.
And now that we have these bigdata sets, we know so much
detail about the lives of eachof these animals.
You know, we know their rank inthe group, we know who they
affiliate with.
We know who initiates thoseaffiliations right, so we have

(38:25):
directional data which is reallyfascinating to us, Because we
have some animals who affiliatea lot but, like they're never
the ones to initiate it.
What is that telling us about?
About them?
Yeah, we know how muchaggression they receive.
We know how much time theyspend feeding, right.
Just all sorts of littledetails.
And, yeah, it has been veryinformative for us to think
about those animals asindividuals and how that plays

(38:48):
into the cognition that theyneed to use day to day, or you
know bigger things that we thinkrelate to some human questions
about how does the environmentthat you're in predict either
how you learn things and or howyou perform, because those are
not the same right?
So we know from our studentsthat you can study really hard

(39:09):
for a test and know everything,and you can still bomb it right.
Right, it doesn't necessarily.
Performance and learning aren'texactly the same thing, and the
same is true in animals, right?
Like we know, the environmentcan influence performance for
many reasons, right, Socialreasons.
Animals might be reluctant todo something that's going to
earn them a reward if they havea dominant animal standing next
to them.
There's tons of great data outthere that show those kinds of

(39:30):
things, and so we're reallyinterested in looking at those
questions, and we can now.

As a behavioral ecologist who studies
wild primates and has for quitea while now, I mean, that's
always been kind of my interestis in how you know what might be
different between how theanimals perform, whether they're
on cognitive tests or justbehaviorally.
In a context like this, whichis quite removed from the places
they evolved, how would it kindof compare to the animals in

(39:55):
the wild?
And I think when you talk now,reggie, about having the
interest in studying socialgroups and their behavior,
that's really fascinating to me.
But I also wonder what are themajor challenges then of trying
to transition a research programinto doing it that way.

The transition I think to, at least, to testing
animals in a social groupsetting, I think, is mostly just
that it has to be voluntarywhen you do it that way, and so
you often just lose a bunch ofsubjects that don't want to
participate right.
So if you have animals in a labenvironment where they're housed
let's say a pair housed and youhave access to them at any

(40:31):
point, your access is easy.
The animals generally areenthusiastic about participating
in research when they havetheir whole social lives.
As we've talked about, there'sreasons they may not want to
participate for social reasonsor just because they don't want
to participate right.
So they have other things goingon and we published a paper a
few years back looking at thebig testing system that we set

(40:53):
up for the Rhesus monkeys atEmory primate center where we
had four touchscreens, computersset up in an enclosure that had
about 120 Rhesus monkeys in itand the monkeys all had RFID
chips so they could come up anduse the touchscreens anytime
they wanted and we got data onwho was using it, when they were
using it, and we wereinterested in looking at who

(41:15):
works and when do they work andhow do the social dynamics
influence who's working at thesame time, things like that.
And basically what we learnedis all of those things matter.
So seasonality, like breedingseason and birthing season, the
use of the touchscreens goesdown dramatically.
When an animal has a baby, theystop working for a while.
So parody had a big role theage of the individuals, who else

(41:39):
is on the screen?
So we found that if you lookedat the peak working times in a
given day, based on rank in thegroup, they staggered themselves
.
So we'd have sort of a peakfrom the high ranking
individuals and then a separatepeak later in the day from the
mid-rankers and then anotherpeak at a different time of day
for the low ranking animals.
So it was just kind of cool tosee that all these things that

(42:00):
we think probably influencewho's going to participate and
how they're going to participatedo.
But that's just stuff you haveto figure out.
You also lose some control, asIkuma pointed out, when you
bring them into a lab spacewhere you have them by
themselves.
In a space you can control thelighting, you can control the
sound, you can control thesocial environment.
When you're testing animals ina big group you don't have any

(42:22):
of that control, or you havesome of it.
I mean you can get some of it,but it's not quite as easy to
get all of it.

Are there specific things, then, that you
this is kind of like a generalquestion about almost what
you're doing now to what happensnext, but where do you see the
major advantages or what are themajor questions that you think
are kind of really important toanswer when you think of the
animals performing in thecontext of groups that you

(42:47):
wouldn't have then when they'redoing it in isolation?

I think for me, the thing that I'm most
interested in is we have like 80years of amazing data on, say,
learning.
We know a lot about learningprocesses, basic learning, how
it works in many differentspecies across species, but
almost all of that data comesfrom animals by themselves, and
it's great because we've beenable to really characterize the

(43:12):
mechanisms.
But the reality is nothing incognition evolved with an animal
by itself, right at least moretime primates, so that learning
or memory or whatever othercognitive process we're talking
about evolved in the context ofliving in a group, and so I
think where we're at now in thefield is that it's on us to say,
okay, so we know the basics ofhow these processes work, but

(43:34):
how do they work in real lifewhen you put them in a group and
you put these animals togetherthe way they would be living
normally, and what does thattell us about the evolution of
those processes?
And I'm not not to say I'm theonly one doing this.
A lot of people are trying tounderstand this better.
But I do think that's where thefield is headed is in trying to
now like take it out of the laband put it Obviously I'm still

(43:56):
in a lab, but put it in a littlebit less of a controlled
environment to start tounderstand how that might change
or how our understanding ofthose mechanisms might shift a
little bit when we add thesocial context back in.

Do you then follow a lot of the kind of
field cognition?

Yeah, and there's some awesome.
So I mean, I have so muchrespect for anybody who can do
field experiments.
It's hard enough in the labwhere I can, like you know,
choose the animals and I havelike 24 hour access to them.
I cannot imagine you read someof these studies and you're like
, oh, it took five years to getthese animals to just happen, to
go where you needed them.

It's so amazing, yeah.

So, and I think, like it's really cool to think
about how these things willcomplement each other, because I
think in the lab, right, thebenefit there is the access to
the animals, the benefit is thecontrol that we can bring and
the frequency with which we cando the cognitive research in the
field.
Of course, the benefit is theyhave a much more naturalistic
environment.
It's, you know, they don't haveveterinarians taking care of
them.
You can look at fitness, right,which we really can't look at

(44:52):
in the lab in any real way, andgenerally the behavioral work is
, you know, much more extensive.
So I think there's like theseparts that both sides bring and
I do hope that, like movingforward, there's a little more
crosstalk, because I think, atleast in primatology, there's
always been this kind ofdistinction between, like, the
lab folks and the field folks.
Right, there's not always a tonof overlap, but I do think

(45:14):
we're heading to a time when weshould be doing more of that.
Okay ready.

You just given me an invitation, so we stop
recording.
I want to talk to you.

Sounds good, maybe you Kuma knows where I'm going.

Okay, we're going to go here.

This will probably be the first time I've
ever done this on the primatecast, but I wonder if you're up
for a little.
We can call it a lightninground.
It's not really a lightninground, but yesterday I asked you
, kuma, to put me in touch withyour four undergrads.
Oh good, and they sent me alist of questions For me.

For you.

Oh, that's so fun.
There's way too many for me Toactually read them out now.
You've already been fed acouple.

Did they prompt you with bunny?

They asked a bunny question they see the
bunny.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yes, In case you're wondering what that, but
they had a really great set ofquestions and so I thought maybe
I could ask a couple of themand I'll just maybe randomly
pick a few.
That I thought we've alreadycovered some of the topics, but
okay, so let's kind of gothrough a few.
The first one, which I findkind of interesting you've

(46:20):
already talked about teachingand how it's really important to
what you're doing at Bucknell.
So what's your favorite courseto teach at Bucknell?

Animal behavior.

Why animal behavior?

So it's the introductory course for our
animal behavior major.
The students take it in theirfirst semester at Bucknell and
it's just such a fun class toteach because it's a really
broad class, so we covercognition and we cover behavior
from all levels right, proximate, ultimate and it's just a very
interactive class so we do a lotof stuff.

(46:53):
It's very data heavy, which Ilove, so we spend a lot of time
looking at studies and thestudents like talking through
them and since it's their firstsemester and it's their first
chance to really get into itparticularly the ones that, like
animal behavior, gets soexcited, and so it's just like a
really enthusiastic group.
I just absolutely love teachingthat class.

My answer is the same I love my animal
behavior.

Do you?
Is it also like first yearstudents, or is it more advanced
?

It's more geared to work first and second.
We even get some grad studentsin it, yeah, so that's awesome.
It's a pretty mixed bag ofdomestic and international
students and it's a lot of fun.
I do it flipped, so they'relooking at lectures outside and
in the classroom we do problemsets.

So it's a lot of kind of working through animal
behavior problems.

It's really fun, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, super great, and weget to take them to Arashiyama.

Okay, that's cooler than we think.

Well, we have our primates.
You have your own primate labs.
Yeah, it's true, we bring themto see the baboons.

So we do have that .

Okay, and then here's a really good one too,
to follow that up have you foundany similarities between
training primates and teachingstudents?

Of course I mean that's like not that that makes
students sound horrible, butit's that's not at all.
I mean, like the processes oflearning are the same, right?
Like that's the whole point.
So I do teach a learning course, which I also love to teach,
and so much of that class isfocused on the idea that, like,
the basic principles of learningare the same whether you're
trying to raise a baby, oryou're trying to train your dog,

(48:15):
or you're training a monkey, oryou're just trying to make your
roommate less annoying, right?
And I think I think that thatuniversality of learning
processes is why they'reinteresting to study, right?
So yes, is the answer to thatquestion.
Okay, tough one here.

So one of the we talked earlier about, you
know whether you're teachingundergrads or grad students and
the probability or possibilitythat they will or will not go
into the academy, and I thinkone of the things that weighs on
a lot of us, I think, asacademics, especially as
trainees in academia, as we feela lot of pressure and you know

(48:58):
that there's a huge epidemic of,you know, anxiety, depression
among graduate students kind ofworldwide, which is not a
surprise and it's great thatmore and more people are open to
talking about it.
But one question we had fromyour undergrads was do you
struggle with imposter syndrome?
And that's something we'vetalked about on this podcast
before.
And I think it's a niceopportunity to have you know
established folks also talkingabout that and I wonder you know

(49:24):
it's such a good question.

I don't know if I suffer from imposter syndrome,
exactly because I think I don'tknow, like as a scientist.
Part of it is that you knowthere's a lot of stuff you don't
know and that's okay, right, so.
So I'm not, like I don't feellike I'm an imposter.
I feel like I'm a scientist whoknows a lot about some very
specific topics, and there'sother stuff I don't know that

(49:49):
much about and I'm alwaysexcited to learn more about it.
So I think in some ways it'sjust like reframing the fact
that, like you do not have to bethe person in the room who
knows everything no one is right.
It's just about like you knowsome things, some things, and
being open to learning fromeverybody else around you.
I don't know.
I think that's just the way toapproach science, and then you

(50:09):
don't feel bad about yourself.
You're just like, oh, this is alearning opportunity.

It's hard to kind of.
I think maybe not everyonemodels that very well.
You know as professionals inour area, and there's a premium
on your intellect right.
Or at least a perceivedespecially traditionally, and so
I feel like that's one of themore sensitive parts of it is
that we, a lot of that is out ofthe box.

(50:32):
So you know, you can meet peoplewho are just out of the box,
really incredible thinkers, andthen you meet people who work
really hard at it, but most ofus are just you know, somewhere
in kind of between and, as yousaid, I mean it's a good way to
approach it that you understandwhat your limitations are and
accept them, and then just theopportunities to grow that we
have, which are maybe not seenin so many other fields, are

(50:53):
really really great yeah.

I think you know I'm a big proponent of
collaboration in science andpart of why I'm, part of why I'm
here right, because we can'tall be experts in everything.
Right, like you can't have sevenPhDs and be an expert in all
the things that you do, and soit's so valuable to work with
people who know more than you doon a particular topic, right,
and then you're bringingdifferent things to the table

(51:16):
and, like, some of the coolestprojects we've done have been
just like these collaborationswith people that are totally
different fields or work withdifferent species or whatever.
I'm sure you've had similarexperiences, right, like you
just get to ask really coolquestions and answer them using
everybody's expertise andbringing it to the table.
And I think a lot of mystudents will probably say this,
either to their benefit or not.

(51:37):
A lot of the stuff I do in myclassroom is collaborative work,
because I just don't thinkscience happens by yourself ever
.
You know science is a teamsport and you really need a team
of people to make it work, andso when we're thinking through
animal behavior problems andanimal behavior or designing
experiments in my comparativecognition class, we're doing it
in a group because they'rereally.
I just don't think you canreally ask great questions by

(51:59):
yourself.

And maybe you could just ask you like do you
see in Japan coming back tooriginal conversation about, how
science is done reallydifferently.
Do you feel, like in Japan too,that there's a shift in the way
people see their roles asscientists here, or so maybe
this is not something that's asdiscussed?

Generally speaking .
I mean, I completely agree withReggie in the sense that you
know, we cannot do everything byourselves.
We cannot be expertise in theold area, basically right.
But here I think in Japan atleast, it was more stressed on
the point that you have to beexpert in something.

(52:42):
So it's like a flip side.
From the beginning you don'tsay I should collaborate with
everyone else, but instead youhave to be a strong person in
something.
Then later on the same thinghappened.
Right, if you are strong insomething, then you can be a
collaborate with some otherstuff.
So in general we are also intomore collaborative works and

(53:04):
that's why we are here together.
But previously the philosophywas, I think, they want to be
someone in something.
That's probably a little bitmore stress in the Japanese
culture, I think.
And also there is a hugedifference across how do you
call it?
Different field in science.

(53:25):
But especially in primatology, Ithink.
Like everyone in the previousyear, I want to do everything by
themselves in the beginning,but then, of course, now you
have to have some strong pointto be a good collaborator.
So instead of having a goodcollaborator from the beginning,
but just you, need to be a goodcollaborator.

Yeah, you have to bring something to the table and
for that.

yes, that's just a little bit different perception
, but goal is, I guess, in thesame thing.

Okay, really quick one.
Which is worse,anthropomorphism or
Anthropononyle?

Oh, that's such a hard question.
I can't answer that.
I guess anthropomorphism,anthropomorphism.

Probably yeah.

Yeah.
Yeah, it's a complicatedquestion.
I'll just leave it there.

Okay, I mean it's more like a fit to the critical
thinking perception at least.
Right yeah, have to start witha doubt.
Is that really so?
Yes, but which doesn't mean theother side is always good
either, because sometimes, liketaking them as your own
representative, for example,then you can better understand

(54:34):
sometimes why that behaviorhappened.
If I wore you, I might thinkthat way we need to test it, so
we don't just believe it, wejust need to test it.
So I mean answer is intermediatealways.
Which is bad?
It's just without any belief,without any doubt.
Just believe that they are aswe are, then that's probably the

(54:55):
wrong or worse.

For me at least.
That was a very good answer, Iagree.

Do you have any funny stories of?
I tried to do this last timewith Ikuma and Sarah.
They really have a good answerto any funny stories about.
I did that with Tsumu and TeslaMonson as well.
Any funny stories as gradstudent with Ikuma as a postdoc
back in the Hampton days.

I think so.
Is that horrible?
I don't think I have any funnystories.
I really can't think of any.
It's a chance to embarrass eachother no.
I really don't have any.
Nothing ridiculous I feel likehappened.
We were a pretty stand up laband that's our story.

we're sticking to it, okay fair enough, well, but
I can still make one fun story.

Okay, here we go Well.

It's not related to science, though, but people
are not changing a lot.
That I found out after Iwelcome her here.
When we are in the lab in theAlanta together During the
lunchtime, she always picked thebread and peanut butter on an

(56:01):
almost everyday basis.
Sometimes Apple added it, butshe's the one who is always okay
to just, you know, simplifyingthe lunch and then put more
energy to the science or theclass and those stuff.
And now she's here in Japan.
Every day she's doing the samelunch, and if you don't want to

(56:22):
eat anything else then she says,ah, lunch is fine, ah, same.

Same, it's true.
People don't change 20 yearslater.

And sincerity towards those scientific
approaches are always same inher too, like you know.
Just really decent time ofthinking about that.
You still have a dinner.
It has more big portions, nice,but for lunch just simplify it
and then try to think aboutscience more and more and more.
Talking about students, talkingabout I was amazed in a good

(56:50):
way and also give me somenostalgic memory.
Ah, same, huh Same.

Well, along the same lines, same.
So you seem to have aninordinate affinity for Bucknell
University.

It does seem that way, doesn't it, and so I wonder
if you can comment on like.

What was the process?
You graduate from there withyour undergrad and you end up
now as faculty.

Yeah, that was not planned at all Not planned.
I mean, if you had told20-year-old me that I'd be back
in Lewisburg, pennsylvania, formy life, I would definitely not
have believed you.
But you know, I think when youknow, when you're in grad school
, you spend a lot of timethinking about what you want to
do with your life, right, andyou change your mind weekly and
then you decide you're going tobe a florist or whatever, right.
But I think what I realizedthrough my grad experiences was

(57:35):
like I really I love research, Ilove being able to do research.
I wanted to work with primates,I knew that.
But I really loved teaching, youknow, and Rob was an amazing
advisor but you know, watchinghim in his career, it was clear
to me I didn't want thatparticular career where so much
of the focus was on grantwriting, so little of the focus

(57:57):
was on teaching.
You know, teaching was a sort oflike side thing you had to do,
sort of.
I don't mean to imply that Robdidn't like to do it, but just
like that was sort of theperception there.
And so when I started lookingfor jobs, I was looking for a
place where I could work withprimates and where I could teach
, and there's not a lot of greatoptions and Bucknell's
wonderful, and I think the thingthat's unique about Bucknell

(58:18):
not unique, obviously, there'sother schools like this we have
what they call theteacher-scholar model right,
which is this idea that, like,we are both teachers and we are
scholars and the expectation isthat you teach and that you have
an active research program thatengages your students, and
that's not that common right.
So usually there's a heavy pushon teaching or a heavy push on
scholarship, so it's really coolthat we get to do both, and so

(58:40):
that was really what drove methere and I've been happily
there for nine years now nineyears, I guess.

Yeah, and I don't know if this is.
We can edit this out if itdoesn't work, but you mentioned
earlier that Peter's judge wasretiring and that may be
connected to the fact thatBucknell is hiring.

It is connected to that.
Yes, so Peter's judge isretiring and I wonder if you
want to talk about that andmaybe we can help promote for
you.

Yeah, totally.

Happy to yeah.
So Peter is retiring at the endof this academic year, so
spring of 2024.
So we will be hiring thiscoming fall, fall of 23, for a
new primate animal behaviorperson.
But it's very open position.
It's in fact an open ranksearch, so it doesn't have
tenure, but we will considerpeople at any rank.

(59:23):
The only requirement is thatthey work with the primates on
campus.
So we have a wonderful colonyof primates and we want to bring
someone else in who can workwith those animals and work with
our students and work withinthis sort of teacher-scholar
model that we have.

And I think basically the last hour we spent
talking gives a good impressionof what life and work is like
there at Bucknell University.

So we're really interested.
Yeah, and you can reach out tome.
I'm chairing the searchcommittee, so drop me an email.

Okay.
So as we kind of close out herebefore I ask you if there's
anything we've missed, the onequestion I couldn't leave out
from your students is what's itgoing to take for you to do
karaoke with them?

Reggie Gazes (01:00:00):
Oh, there's no chance Sorry.
Sorry, I tried.

Andrew MacIntosh (01:00:06):
So is there anything else, Reggie, that
maybe you want to circle back onor that we didn't really talk
about you think is importantfrom this conversation?

I don't think, so what do you think?

You did okay.

I think we're doing okay, okay.

Well then, reggie Gazes, thanks so much for
joining.

Oh, there's one thing.

When I said your name.
I just realized that in youremail, I think, you have a link
to the pronunciation of yourname.

Yeah, that's a thing in the States now.

I was pleasantly surprised by that.
I'd never seen it before.

Yeah, it's becoming more common now.
So that way, if you have a namethat people mispronounce
regularly or not, people don'treally have a very good excuse
for not just learning how to sayyour name properly.
So it's been very helpful.
People always grew up my lastname.
I know I screw up my students'names.
When you just see them in printfor the first time, you don't
know how to say it, so it'sawesome to have that resource.

I like it.
I mean it gives a sense ofinclusion as well, because it
just it really levels a playingfield for folks who don't have
the same background, samecultural understandings.
I really like it.
So perhaps on my email I shouldask you to see that in the
picture as well.
Reggie Gazes, thanks so muchfor joining us on the primate
cast.

Thanks for having me.

You come, as always.
Thanks for supporting.

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