Collaboration and Transparency in Primate Cognition Research

The field of primate cognition studies how primates, including humans, perceive, process, store, retrieve, and use information to guide decision making and other behavior. Much of this research is motivated by a desire to understand how these abilities evolved. Large and diverse samples from a wide range of species are vital to achieving this goal. In reality, however, primate cognition research suffers from small sample sizes and is often limited to a handful of species, which constrains the evolutionary inferences we can draw. The ManyPrimates project is one approach to overcome some of these issues by establishing an infrastructure for large-scale collaboration in primate cognition research. I’ve played a small part in this effort, helping write a recent review on the topic, and contributing data from >50 lemurs for ManyPrimates’ first full-scale project (MP1): a working memory task administered to >450 individual primates around the world. Data analysis is currently ongoing; be on the lookout for a preprint soon. This project has put together one of the largest and most diverse primate samples, in any field, to date, and we’re only looking to go upwards from here! MP2 and MP3 are in the works. For more, check out https://manyprimates.github.io.