ATLANTA — Four-year-old Bernas isn't the computer wizard his mom is, but he's learning.
Just the other day he used his lips and feet to play a game on the touch-screen monitor as his mom, Madu, swung from vines and climbed trees.
The two Sumatran orangutans at Zoo Atlanta are playing computer games while researchers study the cognitive skills of the orange-and-brown primates.
Zoo visitors get to watch their every move.
The orangutans use a touch screen built into a treelike structure that blends in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.
"That's so cool," Jeri McCarthy told her three daughters as Bernas drew a red, blue and yellow picture on the screen. "He can't get enough."
Zoo officials hope the exhibit will raise awareness of the rapidly diminishing wild orangutan population, which is on track to disappear in the next decade, and potentially provide keys to its survival.
People are also reading…
"The more we understand about orangutans' cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo. "It enables us to show the public how smart they are."
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals. Correct answers are rewarded with food. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen.
The games, which volunteers from IBM spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.
Researchers hope the data can point to new conservation strategies to help the 37,000 orangutans living in the wild on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
On the Net: Zoo Atlanta, www.zooatlanta.org
