![]() Roxanne is a smart, enthusiastic participant in our positive reinforcement training program. Personal Trainer: Rebekah Lewis, Positive Reinforcement Training Program Coordinator We address weight management with our Personal Trainer program.Ĭhimp: Roxanne, 28 years old, living the Chimp Life since 2014 Although at Chimp Haven the chimps have lots of room to roam and climb, they are just like people and occasionally need the motivation to get moving. ![]() Chimps can be trained to show care staff a scratch on their arm, to take an injectable medication (such as insulin), or even to allow for monitoring of more complex health issues, such as arthritis or heart conditions. We're also on Facebook & Google+.Chimp Haven retirees are trained (using positive reinforcement) to participate in their own veterinary care and individualized wellbeing plans. "This might have facilitated long distance hunting parties."įollow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries llmysteries. "The general theory is that well-developed skills in mental rotation allowed long distance navigation: using an egocentric system where essentially you navigate using your perception of your location in 3D space," he said. This is purely speculative, Wallen said, but boys' superior spatial abilities have been tied to their traditional role as hunters. "It could be that manipulating objects like balls and wheels in space is one way this mental rotation gets more fully developed." "Multiple studies in humans and primates shows there is a substantial male advantage in mental rotation, which is taking an object and rotating it in the mind," Wallen said. īoys, meanwhile, tend to develop superior spatial navigation abilities. According to Alexander, one possibility is that girls have evolved to perceive social stimuli, such as people, as very important, while the perceived worth of social stimuli (and thus, dolls that look like people) is weaker in boys. As for why evolution would program these toy preferences, the researchers have a few ideas. If it isn't vigorous activity they're after, it could be that boys simply find balls and wheeled vehicles more interesting, while human figures appeal more to girls. A paper detailing the work has been accepted for publication in the journal Hormones and Behavior. "We find no evidence to support the widely held belief that boys prefer toys that support higher levels of activity," she wrote in an email. Toddlers with higher levels of testosterone are more active than toddlers with lower levels of the sex hormone, but the active toddlers moved around just as much when holding a toy truck, ball or doll. In a new study, Alexander and her colleagues investigated whether 19-month-olds move around when playing with trucks and balls more than they do when playing with dolls. The debate over why boys prefer toy vehicles and balls continues. They could be looking at a certain toy because it facilitates an activity they like," he said. Clearly children recognize that certain objects in their environment are appropriate for certain activities. "It's hard to interpret what the looking data mean because we don't know why people are attracted to specific things. Wallen approaches the data more cautiously. "Given that these babies lack physical abilities that would allow them to 'play' with these toys as do older children, our finding suggests that males preference for male-typical toys are not determined by the activities supported by the toys (i.e., movement, rough play)," Alexander said. At just 3 months old, the newborn boys already fixed their eyes on the toys associated with their gender. But the 2009 study indicated that their affinity for balls and trucks predates the stage when children actually start playing with toys. Kim Wallen, a psychologist at Emory University who has studied the gender-specific toy preferences of young rhesus monkeys, said, "The striking thing about the looking data shows that the attraction to these objects occurs very early in life, before it's likely to have been socialized."įurther buttressing the idea that toy preferences are caused by hormones, last year, a group of British researchers found that girls with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who experienced abnormally high levels of the male sex hormone androgen while in the womb, prefer to play with male-typical toys. īut why would male sex hormones make people favor wheeled vehicles and balls? A common explanation holds that these toys facilitate more vigorous activity, which boys are evolutionarily programmed to seek out.
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