Establishing a Culture of Collaboration in Primate Cognition ResearchThe ManyPrimates project was initiated to facilitate collaboration across study sites in primate cognition research. By joining forces, we hope to address important outstanding questions that individual labs could not answer by themselves.
For more information visit the project website.
Many Primates 1 Pilot In the first pilot study, we conducted a short-term memory task with 187 primates from 12 species and 11 sites. The publication of the pilot project is available online at PLOS ONE: Many Primates, Altschul DM, Beran MJ, Bohn M, Call J, et al. (2019) Establishing an infrastructure for collaboration in primate cognition research. PLOS ONE 14(10): e0223675. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223675 Many Primates 1 The full dataset and analysis is now out in Animal Behavior and Cognition: "Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-response task. Our results confirm previous findings that longer delays decrease memory performance across species and taxa. Our analyses demonstrate a considerable contribution of phylogeny over ecological and social factors on the distribution of short-term memory performance in primates; closely related species had more similar short-term memory abilities. Overall, individuals in the branch of Hominoidea performed better compared to Cercopithecoidea, who in turn performed above Platyrrhini and Strepsirrhini. Interdependencies between phylogeny and socioecology of a given species presented an obstacle to disentangling the effects of each of these factors on the evolution of short-term memory capacity. However, this study offers an important step forward in understanding the interspecies and individual variation in short-term memory ability by providing the first phylogenetic reconstruction of this trait’s evolutionary history. The dataset constitutes a unique resource for studying the evolution of primate cognition and the role of short-term memory in other cognitive abilities." Many Primates 2 & 3 We are currently on the details for MP2 (delay of gratification) and MP3 (inference by exclusion). The latest updates on MP2 can be found on another entry on my website or just head to the official ManyPrimates website. Get involved with any aspect of the project (e.g. organisation, data collection, analysis, writing) by visiting the website and getting in touch.
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