Dorothy Fragaszy
Dorothy Fragazy is a comparative psychologist, primatologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia. She chaired the graduate program in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in her department for 24 years, stepping down in 2017. She earned her bachelor's degree at Duke University, and completed her Ph.D. in 1978 at the University of California, Davis. Fragaszy studies primates' behavior from ethological, ecological, psychological, and biomechanical perspectives. She focuses on behavioral development, learning, problem-solving, perceptual and motor skills, foraging behavior, manual dexterity, social influences on learning, and technical traditions. For most of her career, Fragaszy studied these topics primarily with captive capuchin monkeys and occasionally with captive chimpanzees and humans. Since 2005, she and her collaborators in the EthoCebus project (http://www.ip.usp.br/ethocebus/) have studied wild bearded capuchin monkeys in the Cerrado of Brazil. They combine experimental methods of studying behavior with traditional field work in this project. These monkeys use stone hammers to crack palm nuts and other hard, encased food items. They use stones that can weigh more than they weigh themselves, transporting them to anvils and standing bipedally to use them as hammers. She works with collaborators from anthropology, archaeology, biology, geography and kinesiology to understand these monkeys and their unusual technical skills from as broad a perspective as possible. Fragaszy published the edited volume The Biology of Traditions in 2003 and the authored volume The Complete Capuchin in 2004. She has served in several elected offices of the International Primatological Society including President and Secretary General and as President of the American Society of Primatologists. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association of Psychological Science and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association. Fragaszy's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NIH, the Leakey Foundation, and the National Geographic Society.
