Chikako Suda-King
Background
I am originally from Japan. I studied biology at Japan Womens’ University in Tokyo and became increasingly interested in great apes. After doing an internship at the Chimpanzees Unit of the Tama Zoo in Tokyo, I observed the chimpanzees and completed my Bachelor’s thesis on the apes’ gaze interactions under Dr. Shoji Itakura’s supervision. I then enrolled the Master of Science course in Evolutionary Psychology at Liverpool University in England, and wrote my thesis on food sharing among a group of captive chimpanzees at Chester Zoo under supervision of Dr. Josep Call. Having worked as a Research Assistant for Dr. Call at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, I enrolled the Ph.D. program there and studied great apes’ physical cognition. Dr. Call remained my supervisor, and I wrote a doctoral thesis on Piagetian conservation in great apes. After acquiring my Ph.D. from Leipzig University and working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MPI, I started to work at the Smithsonian National Zoo as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and initiated my metacognition project with the zoo’s orangutans and gorillas. I have been working as Dr. Francys Subiaul’s postdoc since April 2009.
Research interests
I am currently interested in whether orangutans and gorillas are able to monitor the strength of their memory trace (i.e., whether apes can tell when they remember), which is the ability called “metacognition”. For instance, imagine that you are preparing for an exam. While you are studying, you can tell whether or not you remember answers for exam questions. If you feel like you are confident, you would stop studying. But if you feel that you are not ready yet, you would continue to work hard. This example shows that we humans are very skillful at assessing our own memory and knowledge. I have been investigating whether our closest living relatives, great apes, have the same kind of skills, and if so, to what extent they are able to monitor their own memory. In addition to metacognition, I am also interested in the ways nonhuman great apes understand the physical world. I have previously examined Piagetian conservation (i.e., the ability to understand that quantities always remain the same even when they change their appearance) in chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.
Research at the National Zoo
At the Smithsonian National Zoo, together with Dr. Marietta Dino and our research interns, I have been training the orangutans to learn to put images in an arbitrary order for Dr. Francys Subiaul’s cognitive imitation project. I have been also running my own project on ape metacognition in collaboration with Dr. Subiaul. We are investigating whether the orangutans are able to selectively escape computerized memory tests when they do not remember correct responses.
