Robert Martin Seyfarth

Professor of Psychology,University of Pennsylvania. With my colleague Dorothy Cheney, I have spent over 40 years studying the social behavior, communication, and cognition of monkeys in their natural habitat. We follow habituated monkeys daily, collecting data on their social behavior, measuring stress levels through fecal samples, tape-recording their vocalizations, and using field playback experiments to study what monkeys know about features of their environment and about the social relations of their fellow group members. Our work on the predator alarm calls of vervet monkeys (Kenya) provided the first experimental evidence for true referential signaling by nonhuman primates in nature. This work on communication and cognition was summarized in our book How Monkeys See the World (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990, University of Chicago Press). Our long-term studies of social behavior in baboons (Botswana) has documented these animals' knowledge of other baboons' dominance ranks and kin relations. We have also found that female reproductive success is determined partly by dominance rank but much more importantly by an individual's ability to form close, enduring social bonds with other females. This work has been summarized in Baboon Metaphysics (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007, University of Chicago Press). Our current interests focus on the factors that affect social success in nonhuman primates, the role of cognition in the formation of close social bonds, and the similarities and differences between human language and the communication of monkeys and apes.