She is a captive bred Sumatran orangutan. He is a neuroscientist specialising in cognitive and sensory systems research. With the help of eye-tracking equipment they are hoping to explain some of the mysteries of the visual brain and improve the lives of captive animals.

Dr Neil Mennie, from The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC), is studying the eye movements of Tsunami, a seven-year-old orangutan at The National Zoo of Malaysia (Zoo Negara). By addressing questions about the visual cognition of humans and apes in natural tasks, Dr Mennie’s research will also help enrich the captive orangutan’s environment.

Dr Mennie said: “Orangutans are particularly interesting because to survive in the treetops they must be very spatially aware of their surroundings. I hope to investigate their ability to search for food and to compare their progress with humans in 3D search and foraging tasks.”

Dr Mennie, who is from the Cognitive and Sensory Systems Research Group in the School of Psychology at UNMC, is interested in how humans and apes use their brains to learn and make predictions about our surroundings. With the help of Tsunami’s keeper, Mohd Sharullizam Ramli, and eye-tracking equipment that is worn over her head and shoulders, Dr Mennie has spent the last year recording Tsunami’s eye and body movements during actions such as moving and climbing, foraging and manipulating objects with her hands and feet.

Tsunami was slowly introduced to the eye-tracking equipment — a backpack transmitter that sends data from two video cameras mounted on her headband. As Tsunami forages, uses tools and moves around, one camera films what she sees and the other records the movements of her right eye. Dr Mennie and his students study each of the three eye movements she makes per second.

Dr Mennie, whose research is funded by Malaysia’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Innovation, said: “I’m interested in the way we make predictive eye movements to places where the stimulus is yet to appear and whether these help assist the timing and placement of actions or whether they also help high-level mechanisms such as memory for our immediate space and the location of objects.”

Dr Mennie hopes shedding light on how orangutans navigate and forage will help conservationists design forest corridors.

At Zoo Negara, zoologists say the research will help them develop an Enrichment Programme designed to encourage captive animals to behave as they would in the wild.

Faradilla Ain Roselan, Zoology Officer at Zoo Negara Enrichment Centre, said: “We want to keep our animals occupied so they don’t display stereotypical behaviour such as pacing. We also want them to be able to exhibit any natural behaviour. Apes are highly intelligent animals and we don’t want them to get bored. If we predict what they want to do maybe we can think of an enrichment that would suit their intelligence.”

Dr Mennie’s long-term goal is to record animals in the wild. He said: “The orangutan is a flagship symbol of Malaysia and I think it is fitting that this research is done here at The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus.”

With funding from the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) Dr Mennie has already studied orangutan eye movements in free-ranging behaviour. MOHE has also funded a project that looked at the predictive eye movements of humans when they play Congkak, a Malaysian game.