Sanjana Kadam, a PhD student, received the Best Poster Presentation Award at the 11th European Federation for Primatology Meeting (EFP 2026).
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Sanjana Kadam, a PhD student, received the Best Poster Presentation Award at the 11th European Federation for Primatology Meeting (EFP 2026).
“Temporal dynamics of attentional capture in chimpanzees”
Comments from Sanjana
“Attention is limited, and can therefore lead to biases, furthermore emotionally significant information can capture our attention even when it is unrelated to what we are trying to do. In this study, we examined how emotional stimuli influence visual attention in chimpanzees over time through an Attentional Blink paradigm. Using a rapid serial visual presentation task, we investigated how positive, negative, and neutral distractors affected the chimpanzees’ ability to detect a subsequent target. Our findings showed that emotional distractors interfered with early target detection, with target detection improving over time. This research contributes to our understanding of how emotion and attention interact in nonhuman primates and may provide insight into the evolutionary origins of emotional attention.
I was both honored and excited to have received one of the two Best Poster Presentation Awards at the 11th European Federation for Primatology Meeting. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, collaborators, colleagues, the animal care and research staff, and the chimpanzees at the Institute for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior for their invaluable support and contribution to this research.”
Related link: 11th European Federation for Primatology Meeting (EFP 2026)
