This is our 27th and final year of working with and sharing information about the cotton top tamarins that Julie Neiworth was given as a generous donation from U-Wisconsin-Madison. Julie worked for a year before delivery, writing up plans and obtaining permission for housing a total of 8 monkeys at Carleton in 1998. We ended up accepting other couples as time went on, and took in a total of 5 tamarins from a lab that was closing in 2015. In all, we studied and cared for 32 monkeys over a 27-year period, but the last elderly monkey, Oriole, our Queen, died in late June, 2024. Our guiding principle was to accept pair-bonded monkey couples and families, and to always house them socially. We maintained a "sanctuary" atmosphere, pledging to keep the monkeys "wild" and not tamed with human contact. This allowed us to study their natural social behavior, and to pose cognitive problems for them to solve with their voluntary participation.
We are still compiling data on the tamarins' cognitive and perceptual abilities, and will be posting archival video footage and new publications here, as well as our work to donate important support/supplies to primate sanctuaries (shout out to Alveus Sanctuary and Oregon Primate Rescue)!
We cared for and worked with:
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32 monkeys that have spanned over three generations
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About 156 undergraduate collaborators to date
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Five NIH grants, totaling $1.7 million dollars and
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More than 2 dozen publications and presentations
This program is supervised by Julie Neiworth, Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of the Natural Sciences and Psychology.
​See the latest PowerPoint presentation (make sure to select "open in PowerPoint" after you click so you don't have to download it -- it's big) of 10 years of cognitive decline and savings in cotton top tamarins, presented by Julie Neiworth and Ella Rogers ('24, Tamarin Cognition Educational Associate) at the 65th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New York, Nov 23, 2024.
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Read the LATEST most current work being published from the lab. This just in (Oct 16, 2023), our publication in Nature's Scientific Reports entitled "A recognition test in monkeys to differentiate recollection from familiarity memory." Click the title to link to the article.
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Current grant: NIH AREA grant 2R15AG051940-02 (see NIH RePORTER), Longitudinal Cognitive Behavioral Testing and Immunohistochemical Assessment of Alzheimer’s Disease Markers, Immune Response, Neurogenesis, and Cell Loss in a Natural Aging Primate Model, $438,067, Feb 2021 – Jan 2025.
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