Early development of personality in black-striped capuchins (Sapajus libidinosus)

Abstract

Interindividual differences began to receive more attention in studies of animal behavior in the recent decades. As such, the interest in animal personality emerges with the objective of studying this phenomenon from the ecological and evolutionary sciences. Personality research has been mainly based on a repeatability paradigm in experimental context and has focused little on the development of consistent behavioral differences between individuals in the same population, although a growing body of literature on phenotypic plasticity provides a basis for discussion. In primatology, early work on personality emerged with the aim of establishing a continuum between personality in species of nonhuman primates and human personality and comparison between species of nonhuman primates. The present research intends to investigate how individuals of the species Sapajus libidinosus, a primate of the new world well known for its behavioral flexibility and little studied within the field of the personality, present individual differences in the exhibition of affiliative and agonistic behaviors, trying to understand if these differences are from birth or establish themselves over time. Recorded videos will be transcribed during the first three months of life of each infant, in addition to videos recorded in the sixth, ninth and twelfth months of their lives. Behavioral coding will be done with the help of Noldus Observer XT13 software. For statistical analysis of the obtained data will be used a measure of repeatability based on GLMM. (AU)