Ai

Ai (born in 1976, estimated) is a female western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), currently living at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University (acronym KUPRI). She is the first subject of the Ai project, a research program started in 1978 by Kiyoko Murofushi and Tetsuro Matsuzawa which is aimed at understanding chimpanzee cognition through computer interface experiments. Biography Ai was born in 1976 (estimated), in the Guinean Forests of West Africa. Born wild, Ai was soon taken into captivity and sold to KUPRI in 1977 by an animal trader (this type of sale became illegal in 1980 with Japan's ratification of CITES). She was the first subject of KUPRI’s chimpanzee project, which was intended to become Japan’s first ape-language study in the vein of earlier ape-language studies. Ai was joined at KUPRI the following year by two more chimpanzees, Akira and Mari. In 2000, Ai gave birth to a son, Ayumu. Ai Project Matsuzawa has written that the difference between the Ai Project and earlier ape-language studies is that he was less interested in seeing if Ai and the other chimpanzees were capable of learning some degree of human language than trying to understand how chimpanzees perceive their surroundings. To study this, the research team created a unique keyboard through which Ai and the other chimpanzees at KUPRI could interact with a computer –– the computer was used to standardize the studies and reduce variation that might be introduced by human researchers, and because the mechanism could be easily used in comparative studies on humans. With this method, researchers have studied Ai’s memory, number-learning, and perception of color. Matsuzawa wrote that Ai was “the first chimpanzee who learned to use Arabic numerals to represent numbers,” and her ordering of different shades and hues of Munsell color chips was similar to human orderings. Group and living quarters In 2000, not long after the birth of three chimpanzees, Ai's group numbered 15; in 2010, there were 14 members. This is similar to the size of some small chimpanzee groups in the wild, where in some places with stable food supplies group size hovers at around 20 chimpanzees. Matsuzawa has attempted to blend elements of laboratory and field research, and KUPRI has an outdoor complex for the chimpanzees called the Ape Research Annex, built in 1995, with an 8-meter tall tower, a river, and trees.