beginning my scientist investigation

The scientist I have chosen for my exploration of information seeking behavior is Laurie Santos. She is a psychology professor at Yale University. On her Yale profile page she says "My current work explores what primates understand about physical objects and their motions, how primates spontaneously reason about different kinds of things (foods, artifacts, and animals), and whether or not non-human primates possess precursors to a theory of mind." Some of her more current studies are focused on the economic behavior of capuchin monkeys and lemurs and their similarities to humans, including some of the same illogical choices.

I started my search with a basic EBSCO Academic Search Complete. I wanted to get an idea of Prof. Santos' published writing. Surprisingly one of the things that I found most useful was not an article in scholarly journal but an interview in Discover magazine. In this interview she discusses her background, how she stumbled into psychology as an undergrad through an elective class, who she is working with now and she even mentions an experiment in risk aversion that seems to have inspired her. I had been wondering what led her to focus her experiments on primate economic behavior and in this article she explains how some new monkeys in her research lab were handing their orange peels to the keepers. She realized that they had been previously trained in a token economy. As the orange peels are not real tokens this must have made her wonder about their perception of economy.

I also went into the Yale site and read her profile page. Here she has a link to a personal web page. This in turn led me to her lab-page. Here she has posted short profiles for her graduate assistants and a list of other collaborators. Many of these are professors in related fields such as language and cognition. I think these collaborations would be a great source of information gathering and inspiration.

Next, I will try to find out what type of organizations she may belong to. I feel like I should know how to go about this but right now am at a bit of a loss so I'll probably ask some of the wonderful librarians I work with for some hints and post later.