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Maisy Englund

Center
Animal Welfare Science Program
Areas of Expertise
Primate Behavior and Cognition Behavioral Economics Choice Behavior and Bias
Education
  • M.A. – Psychology, Georgia State University
  • B.A. – Psychology, French & Francophone Studies, Illinois Wesleyan University

About

Maisy is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University conducting research at Lincoln Park Zoo. Maisy is interested in studying animal choice behavior and biases, and how research on those topics can inform animal welfare decisions. As the Animal Welfare Ph.D. Fellow, Maisy will spend part of her time at Lincoln Park Zoo conducting animal welfare research with the Animal Welfare Science Program, and part of her time collecting data for her dissertation project. Maisy’s dissertation will explore the potential influence of a status quo bias in several nonhuman primate species: crowned lemurs and pied tamarins at Lincoln Park Zoo, and tufted capuchins and rhesus macaques at the Language Research Center in Atlanta.

Previously, Maisy received her master’s degree under the supervision of Michael J. Beran, Ph.D., at Georgia State University. Her thesis compared young human children, rhesus macaques, and tufted capuchins on their susceptibility to choice overload and the paradox of choice effect. During her time at Georgia State, Maisy has contributed to research on statistical learning, visual illusions, and numerical cognition in primates and sensory abilities of Guatemalan beaded lizards. Maisy has also conducted research at Zoo Atlanta, Louisville Zoo, and Miller Park Zoo, and was an Animal Behavior Research Intern at St. Louis Zoo. At Lincoln Park Zoo, she looks forward to working on applied welfare projects and expanding her research to include more non-primate species.

Publications

Beran, M.J., Englund, M.D., Haseltine, E.L., Agrillo, C., & Parrish, A. E. (Accepted). Evidence of the connectedness illusion in non-human primates’ relative quantity judgments? Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.Englund, M.D. & Beran, M.J. (2022). No evidence of the choice overload effect in a computerized paradigm with rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella). Behavioural Processes, 194, 104545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2021.104545.Englund, M., Whitham, W., Conway, C.M., Beran, M.J., & Washburn, D.A. (2022). Nonhuman primates learn adjacent dependencies but fail to learn nonadjacent dependencies in a statistical learning task with a salient cue. Learning & Behavior, 50, 242-253. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-021-00485-2.Bowden, M.D. & Washburn, D. (2020). Primate research centers. In J. Vonk & T. Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Switzerland: Springer Cham. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1579-1.

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