A transformation falls upon Dorothy Fragaszy: her eyes brighten, laughter comes quickly and easily, her hands start painting imaginary pictures in the air. This is what happens when the University of Georgia psychologist talks about what is clearly her passion: capuchin monkeys.

“Ever since she came back from Brazil,” notes Katherine Leighty, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who has worked closely with Fragaszy, her major professor, “she’s been like a little kid. When you ask her about it, her face lights up, and it’s like you’re asking a kid about her recent trip to Disney World.”

Fragaszy, who has worked at UGA since 1990, went to Brazil last December on what she calls a “reconnaissance” mission. The term conjures covert operations, sneaking around, perhaps peering through binoculars before scaling a mysterious wall under the cover of night. As it happens, Fragaszy was in fact scaling rocky ridges and hiking in the woodland of Piaui, a state in northeastern Brazil.

In February 2003, Fragaszy had seen a BBC Wildlife Magazine photo essay, in which it appeared that wild capuchin monkeys were cracking nuts open with enormous stones, and in a very dramatic manner: standing on hind legs, heaving said stones above their heads and slamming them down upon an anvil-type surface. In other words, they were using tools—a skill mostly associated in the nonhuman primate world with chimpanzees and a population of orangutans in Indonesia. Captive capuchins had been documented using tools, but never had anypopulation been reported to use tools routinely.

Fragaszy and her colleagues waited patiently behind a blind built near a nut-cracking area, video camera at the ready. When they finally saw a wild capuchin heave a rock from the air and onto a nut in a dramatic smash, they made history. And erupted into pure joy. (She worked with Patricia Izar of the University of São Paulo, Elizabetta Visalberghi of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche in Rome and Marino Gomes de Oliveria of the Fundacão BioBrasil in Bahia, Brazil. Eduardo Ottoni, a colleague of Izar’s, wasn’t there but co-authored with the rest their findings for the American Journal of Primatology.)

“We felt like Darwin,” she says laughing, seemingly instantly transported back to that moment of fresh glee. “We were jumping up and down! We were singing! It was amazing.”

In her office, Fragaszy offers to share that videotape and begins digging around for it. Her office is a shrine to her work. A plush, magenta monkey toy lounges on top of a filing cabinet. Her office walls are covered in posters, cards, photos, framed prints, all of them featuring monkeys—from original 19th century illustrations to Curious George. Her walls have run out of room, and more posters stay rolled-up on various shelves. A wicker monkey hangs from a ceiling tile.

She finds the video, and plays it with relish. A lush green jungle surrounds a capuchin the size of a small house cat. Indeed, clear as day, the monkey raises a sizeable rock above his head and slams it down onto the nut by his feet. It is a primal moment, surely, yet the sound is as familiar as a human primate hammering a nail into a wall.

Every time she shows that video, she says, no matter whether the crowd is academic or not, there is a thrilling gasp of excitement and delight. It helps that the monkeys are, well, cute.

“They’re adorable, are you kidding?” says Fragaszy. “They’re very appealing. We definitely feel affection toward them.”

Fragaszy is personally acquainted with the eight capuchin monkeys that live on the UGA campus; in fact, she’s known them since their respective births and considers her subjects to be “good friends.”

“Capuchins have another layer that to me is really fascinating,” she says. “They’re interested in the physical world and what they can do with it. That’s not true of all primates. . . you watch gorillas. They have a rich social life, sure. . . but they never go and do anything interesting in the world in general.”

“Capuchins are extremely busy,” she adds, then smiles. “Their job in life is to take everything apart. They’re extremely curious...this is very appealing to me.”

It’s difficult to resist the temptation to say that perhaps in this regard, Fragaszy shares an interest with her subjects.

“During the 1984 International Primatology Congress in Nairobi, Kenya, I remember being in the same group as Doree while we were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the famous early human fossils by the equally famous Meave Leakey in the National Museums of Kenya,” recalls Linda Fedigan, a primatologist and professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. “Dorothy showed such intense interest in the materials, and I was impressed because she is a psychologist rather than a human evolutionist. That was probably the first time I noticed her strong curiosity and enthusiasm about the world around her and her keen desire to always learn more.”

“Doree has interests in develop-ment that transcend species,” echoes Irwin Bernstein, a psychologist in Fragaszy’s department at UGA. “She has focused on the social transmission of information, which has led to a natural interest in traditions and culture. Her most recent work on tool use [with the wild capuchins] reflects these long term interests.”

It is similarly difficult to resist pointing out another shared characteristic between Fragaszy and her capuchins: They are both extremely busy.

She recently worked on two books, collaborating with Fedigan and Visalberghi on last year’s The Complete Capuchin, and with Susan Perry, a primatologist in Leipzig, Germany, on 2003’s The Biology of Traditions: Models and Evidence, both published by Cambridge University Press. Fedigan notes that Fragaszy pulled “powerful influence” while serving both as secretary-general and, later, president of the International Primatology Society. At UGA, she’s the director of the Skill Development Laboratory and Primate Behavior Laboratory, and she’s chair of the Neuroscience and Behavior Program.

“Doree has an astounding amount of energy,” says Perry. “I honestly don’t see how she maintains so many collaborations while pulling her weight on all of them, but she does!”

Meanwhile, Fragaszy has to maintain a home life for herself­—as well as have time for her three college-aged children, husband, and various rescued dogs. Perry calls Fragaszy’s work-and-home balancing act “a source of inspiration particularly to women scientists who are trying to balance personal and professional aspects of their lives.”

When asked about her non-work life, though, Fragaszy good-naturedly snorts.

“Nonwork life, what’s that?” she says. “I went and played tennis yesterday with my daughter Ellen,” she allows. Pressed, she does list a few hobbies, all intimating that athletics—sailing, hiking, swimming—are a bit of refuge.

“She’s so busy, she’s often running late,” adds Leighty. “We all recognize the sound of her shoes running down the hallways of the psychology building.”

Fragaszy maintains that her career wasn’t something that she dreamed about as a child. “There’s nothing in my early years that pointed to nonhuman primates,” she says. However, growing up on a New York farm, surrounded by hens, horses, sheep, and birds, “I’ve always lived around animals.”

Her calling didn’t become apparent until she was an undergraduate studying psychology at Duke University. She took a class on animal behavior and worked with lemurs in the lab. The attraction was fairly instantaneous.

“I figured it was the most fascinating thing I had ever studied, and the fact you could make a living at it was inspiring to me,” she recalls.

As she received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, she delved deeper into the world of nonhuman primates; meanwhile, she was also studying maternal care, building toward her current research interests: problem solving, manipulation, foraging and feeding in primates, and tool use, percussion, and bimanual coordination in human children. The two areas intersect well; she continues to work on parallel studies of children and animals. At the moment, she’s studying percussion with both capuchins and human toddlers.

“Percussion is a universal form of human tool use,” she says—such as a child banging on a table. “It’s also a form of action associated with tool use with some non-human primates.”

Such as capuchins cracking open nuts.

Even in the flush immediately following their observation in Brazil —that cloud of singing, celebration, and Darwin-esque feelings—Fragaszy says that she and her colleagues knew that they were probably not the first human witnesses to the capuchins’ behavior.

“Of course, they knew it [the capuchins’ tool use] was there—the local people know what’s going on, usually,” she says. “But the scientific community didn’t know about it. We discovered it for science, not the entire world.”

That acknowledgement didn’t dampen the group’s excitement, she notes. And the sweet reward of watching it firsthand was most deserved, her colleagues might say.

Perry considers Fragaszy’s work with the capuchins at UGA “to be the most thought-provoking and convincing set of experiments in the primate social learning literature. They have inspired many other researchers to do similar research.

“The field research in Brazil promises to be very exciting as well,” she continues. “It is in its infancy, but I expect big things from that project!”

One unexpected payoff may be coming early. During their second, postreconnaissance visit to Brazil in January, Fragaszy and her colleagues have noticed an until-now unheard of phenomenon: this particular group of capuchins have adopted a small female marmoset—a New World monkey that weighs only 300-400 grams, in comparison to an adult male capuchin weighing in at a little over four kilograms.

“It is very comical,” she admits, referring to the disparate body size in an image of an adult capuchin holding the tiny marmoset. Fragaszy and her colleagues have named the marmoset “Fortunata”—after her good fortune of having been adopted by such a group.

“That was nice, very nice,” Fragaszy says softly. She and Leighty exchange low murmurs of appreciation while watching Leo, one of the capuchins that lives in the UGA vivarium, perform a computer task quietly and efficiently. It’s part of a study that Leighty is working on that involves 2-D perception.

His tail looped around his perch, Leo’s right hand quickly touches a series of circles on the computer screen. The circles are arranged in a straight line, in an effort to train Leo to make precise movements with his fingers, rather than broad swipes. (Fragaszy notes: “Capuchins are energetic and opportunistic but not particularly precise.”) His left hand never strays far from the chute that automatically dispenses fruit-flavored treats as rewards for each success.

Later, Fragaszy walks into the room where the capuchins live, and their collective screeching builds to a cacophony. For one thing, they are excited to see Fragaszy, whom they have known since birth; for another, they hear the breakfast cart rolling down the hall toward their room.

Fragaszy begins friendly conversation with each capuchin, stroking their hands and speaking in low, sweet tones. The screeching subsides momentarily but is refreshed with the entrance of the breakfast cart.

“That’s happy noise,” Fragaszy reassures her visitor. As they eat ferociously, Fragaszy continues to chat with them, laughing softly: “Jobi, have you calmed down? You’re drooly!”

After watching the capuchins eat their breakfast, Fragaszy changes out of her lab coat and face mask and prepares to dash off to a meeting.

But before she goes, she takes time to remove one of her earrings, which naturally doubles as an impromptu teaching tool. It is a slice of palm nut, which the capuchins in Brazil like to crack open. As she demonstrates the surprising hardness of the nut—“It’s wood!” she exclaims, tapping a fingernail against it—something happens. It’s the look in her eyes, the tone in her voice: the transformation.