Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T22:00:58.979Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Replication and Reproducibility in Primate Cognition Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

By
Benjamin G. Farrar ,
Christopher Krupenye ,
Alba Motes-Rodrigo ,
Claudio Tennie ,
Julia Fischer ,
Drew M. Altschul  and
Ljerka Ostojić
Edited by
Bennett L. Schwartz  and
Michael J. Beran
Bennett L. Schwartz
Affiliation:
Florida International University
Michael J. Beran
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
Get access

Summary

Replication is an important tool used to test and develop scientific theories. Areas of biomedical and psychological research have experienced a replication crisis, in which many published findings failed to replicate. Following this, many other scientific disciplines have been interested in the robustness of their own findings. This chapter examines replication in primate cognitive studies. First, it discusses the frequency and success of replication studies in primate cognition and explores the challenges researchers face when designing and interpreting replication studies across the wide range of research designs used across the field. Next, it discusses the type of research that can probe the robustness of published findings, especially when replication studies are difficult to perform. The chapter concludes with a discussion of different roles that replication can have in primate cognition research.

Keywords

generalizabilityheterogeneityprimatesreplicationreproducibilityresearch designsampling
Type
Chapter
Information
Primate Cognitive Studies , pp. 532 - 550
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, D. M., & Moors, P. (2018). If we accept that poor replication rates are mainstream. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e121.Google Scholar
Allen, C. (2014). Models, mechanisms, and animal minds. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 52, 75–97.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. R., & Gallup, G. G. (2011). Which primates recognize themselves in mirrors? PLoS Biology, 9, e1001024.Google Scholar
Asendorpf, J. B., Conner, M., Fruyt, F. D., Houwer, J. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Fiedler, K., Fiedler, S., Funder, D. C., Kliegl, R., Nosek, B. A., Perugini, M., Roberts, B. W., Schmitt, M., Aken, M. A. G. van, Weber, H., & Wicherts, J. M. (2013). Recommendations for increasing replicability in psychology. European Journal of Personality, 27, 108–119.Google Scholar
Baribault, B., Donkin, C., Little, D. R., Trueblood, J. S., Oravecz, Z., van Ravenzwaaij, D., White, C. N., De Boeck, P., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2018). Metastudies for robust tests of theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115, 2607–2612.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barrett, L. (2015). Why brains are not computers, why behaviorism is not Satanism, and why dolphins are not aquatic apes. The Behavior Analyst, 39, 9–23.Google Scholar
Beach, F. A. (1950). The snark was a boojum. American Psychologist, 5, 115–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Begley, C. G., & Ellis, L. M. (2012). Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature, 483, 531–533.Google Scholar
Beran, M. J. (2001). Summation and numerousness judgments of sequentially presented sets of items by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115, 181–191.Google Scholar
Beran, M. J. (2018). Replication and pre-registration in comparative psychology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 31.Google Scholar
Bonett, D. G. (2012). Replication-extension studies. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 409–412.Google Scholar
Brecht, K. F., Müller, J., & Nieder, A. (2020). Carrion crows (Corvus corone corone) fail the mirror mark test yet again. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 134, 372–378.Google Scholar
Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T.-H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., Kirchler, M., Nave, G., Nosek, B. A., Pfeiffer, T., Altmejd, A., Buttrick, N., Chan, T., Chen, Y., Forsell, E., Gampa, A., Heikensten, E., Hummer, L., Imai, T., … & Wu, H. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 637.Google Scholar
Candea, M. (2013). Habituating meerkats and redescribing animal behaviour science. Theory, Culture & Society, 30, 105–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cartwright, N. (2007). Are RCTs the gold standard? BioSocieties, 2, 11–20.Google Scholar
Chapelain, A. S., Hogervorst, E., Mbonzo, P., & Hopkins, W. D. (2011). Hand preferences for bimanual coordination in 77 bonobos (Pan paniscus): Replication and extension. International Journal of Primatology, 32, 491–510.Google Scholar
Cheney, D. L., Seyfarth, R. M., & Silk, J. B. (1995). The role of grunts in reconciling opponents and facilitating interactions among adult female baboons. Animal Behaviour, 50, 249–257.Google Scholar
Colombo, M., & Scarf, D. (2020). Are there differences in “intelligence” between nonhuman species? The role of contextual variables. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2072.Google Scholar
Crabbe, J. C., Wahlsten, D., & Dudek, B. C. (1999). Genetics of mouse behavior: Interactions with laboratory environment. Science, 284, 1670–1672.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Craig, D. P. A., & Abramson, C. I. (2018). Ordinal pattern analysis in comparative psychology – A flexible alternative to null hypothesis significance testing using an observation oriented modeling paradigm. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 31. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08w0c08sGoogle Scholar
Culina, A., van den Berg, I., Evans, S., & Sánchez-Tójar, A. (2020). Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action. PLOS Biology, 18, e3000763.Google Scholar
Davies, G. M., & Gray, A. (2015). Don’t let spurious accusations of pseudoreplication limit our ability to learn from natural experiments (and other messy kinds of ecological monitoring). Ecology and Evolution, 5, 5295–5304.Google Scholar
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. (2017). DFG Statement on the Replicability of Research Results. Retrieved from www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/announcements_proposals/2017/info_wissenschaft_17_18/Google Scholar
Dunlap, K. (1926). The experimental methods of psychology. In Murchison, C. (Ed.), Psychologies of 1925 (pp. 331–351). Clark University Press.Google Scholar
Eaton, T., Hutton, R., Leete, J., Lieb, J., Robeson, A., & Vonk, J. (2018). Bottoms-up! Rejecting top-down human-centered approaches in comparative psychology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 31. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11t5q9wtGoogle Scholar
Estrada, A., Garber, P. A., Rylands, A. B., Roos, C., Fernandez-Duque, E., Di Fiore, A., Nekaris, K. A.-I., Nijman, V., Heymann, E. W., Lambert, J. E., Rovero, F., Barelli, C., Setchell, J. M., Gillespie, T. R., Mittermeier, R. A., Arregoitia, L. V., de Guinea, M., Gouveia, S., Dobrovolski, R., … & Li, B. (2017). Impending extinction crisis of the world’s primates: Why primates matter. Science Advances, 3, e1600946.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faraut, L., Siviter, H., Pesco, F. D., & Fischer, J. (2019). How life in a tolerant society affects the usage of grunts: Evidence from female and male Guinea baboons. Animal Behaviour, 153, 83–93.Google Scholar
Farrar, B. G., Altschul, D. M., Fischer, J., van der Mescht, J., Placi, S., Troisi, C. A., Vernouillet, A., Clayton, N. S., & Ostojic, L. (2020). Trialling meta-research in comparative cognition: Claims and statistical inference in animal physical cognition. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 7, 419–444.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Farrar, B., G., Boeckle, M., & Clayton, N., S. (2020a). Replications in comparative cognition: What should we expect and how can we improve? Animal Behavior and Cognition, 7, 1–22.Google Scholar
Farrar, B., G., Voudouris, K., & Clayton, N. (2020b). Replications, comparisons, sampling and the problem of representativeness in animal behavior and cognition research. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
Fidler, F., & Wilcox, J. (2018). Reproducibility of scientific results. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/scientific-reproducibility/Google Scholar
Fiedler, K., & Prager, J. (2018). The regression trap and other pitfalls of replication science – Illustrated by the report of the open science collaboration. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 40, 115–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Field, S. M., Hoekstra, R., Bringmann, L., & Ravenzwaaij, D. van. (2019). When and why to replicate: As easy as 1, 2, 3? Collabra: Psychology, 5, 46.Google Scholar
Forss, S., Motes-Rodrigo, A., Hrubesch, C., & Tennie, C. (2020). Chimpanzees’ (Pan troglodytes) problem-solving skills are influenced by housing facility and captive care duration. PeerJ, 8, e10263.Google Scholar
Francis, G. (2014). The frequency of excess success for articles in Psychological Science. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21, 1180–1187.Google Scholar
Fraser, H., Barnett, A., Parker, T. H., & Fidler, F. (2020). The role of replication studies in ecology. Ecology and Evolution, 10, 5197–5207.Google Scholar
Fraser, H., Parker, T., Nakagawa, S., Barnett, A., & Fidler, F. (2018). Questionable research practices in ecology and evolution. PLoS ONE, 13, e0200303.Google Scholar
Gil-da-Costa, R., & Hauser, M. D. (2006). Vervet monkeys and humans show brain asymmetries for processing conspecific vocalizations, but with opposite patterns of laterality. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 273, 2313–2318.Google Scholar
Guest, O., & Martin, A. E. (2020). How computational modeling can force theory building in psychological science [preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rybh9Google Scholar
Halina, M. (2020). Replications in comparative psychology [preprint]. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
Hauser, M. D., & Andersson, K. (1994). Left hemisphere dominance for processing vocalizations in adult, but not infant, rhesus monkeys: Field experiments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 91, 3946–3948.Google Scholar
Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernàndez-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science, 317, 1360–1366.Google Scholar
Hopkins, W. D., Wesley, M. J., Izard, M. K., Hook, M., & Schapiro, S. J. (2004). Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are predominantly right-handed: Replication in three populations of apes. Behavioral Neuroscience, 118, 659–663.Google Scholar
Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2, e124.Google Scholar
Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2012). Scientific inbreeding and same-team replication: Type D personality as an example. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 73, 408–410.Google Scholar
Krasheninnikova, A., Berardi, R., Lind, M.-A., O’Neill, L., & von Bayern, A. M. P. (2019). Primate cognition test battery in parrots. Behaviour, 156, 721–761.Google Scholar
Krasheninnikova, A., Chow, P. K. Y., & von Bayern, A. M. P. (2020). Comparative cognition: Practical shortcomings and some potential ways forward. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 74, 160–169.Google Scholar
Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354, 110–114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lakatos, I. (1970). Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In Lakatos, I. & Musgrave, A. (Eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge (pp. 91–196). Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, M. D., Criss, A. H., Devezer, B., Donkin, C., Etz, A., Leite, F. P., Matzke, D., Rouder, J. N., Trueblood, J. S., White, C. N., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2019). Robust modeling in cognitive science. Computational Brain & Behavior, 2, 141–153.Google Scholar
Leonelli, S. (2018, January 28). Re-thinking reproducibility as a criterion for research quality [preprint]. PsyArXiv. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14352/Google Scholar
Lind, J. (2018). What can associative learning do for planning? Royal Society Open Science, 5, 180778.Google Scholar
Llorente, M., Riba, D., Palou, L., Carrasco, L., Mosquera, M., Colell, M., & Feliu, O. (2011). Population-level right-handedness for a coordinated bimanual task in naturalistic housed chimpanzees: Replication and extension in 114 animals from Zambia and Spain. American Journal of Primatology, 73, 281–290.Google Scholar
Machery, E. (2020). What is a replication? Philosophy of Science, 709701.Google Scholar
MacLean, E. L., Hare, B., Nunn, C. L., Addessi, E., Amici, F., Anderson, R. C., Aureli, F., Baker, J. M., Bania, A. E., Barnard, A. M., Boogert, N. J., Brannon, E. M., Bray, E. E., Bray, J., Brent, L. J. N., Burkart, J. M., Call, J., Cantlon, J. F., Cheke, L. G., … & Zhao, Y. (2014). The evolution of self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111, E2140–2148.Google Scholar
ManyPrimates, Altschul, D., Beran, M. J., Bohn, M., Caspar, K., Fichtel, C., Försterling, M., Grebe, N., Hernandez-Aguilar, R. A., Kwok, S. C., Rodrigo, A. M., Proctor, D., Sanchez-Amaro, A., Simpson, E. A., Szabelska, A., Taylor, D., van der Mescht, J., Völter, C., & Watzek, J. (2019a). Collaborative open science as a way to reproducibility and new insights in primate cognition research [preprint]. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
ManyPrimates, Altschul, D. M., Beran, M. J., Bohn, M., Call, J., DeTroy, S., Duguid, S. J., Egelkamp, C. L., Fichtel, C., Fischer, J., Flessert, M., Hanus, D., Haun, D. B. M., Haux, L. M., Hernandez-Aguilar, R. A., Herrmann, E., Hopper, L. M., Joly, M., Kano, F., … & Watzek, J. (2019b). Establishing an infrastructure for collaboration in primate cognition research. PLoS ONE, 14, e0223675.Google Scholar
Mendes, N., Rakoczy, H., & Call, J. (2011). Primates do not spontaneously use shape properties for object individuation: A competence or a performance problem? Animal Cognition, 14, 407–414.Google Scholar
Minocher, R., Atmaca, S., Bavero, C., McElreath, R., & Beheim, B. (2020). Reproducibility improves exponentially over 63 years of social learning research. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
Motes Rodrigo, A., Ramirez Torres, C. E., Hernandez Salazar, L. T., & Laska, M. (2018). Hand preferences in two unimanual and two bimanual coordinated tasks in the black-handed spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 132, 220–229.Google Scholar
Murphy, T., Dias, G. P., & Thuret, S. (2014). Effects of diet on brain plasticity in animal and human studies: Mind the gap. Neural Plasticity, 2014.Google Scholar
Nelson, E. L., Figueroa, A., Albright, S. N., & Gonzalez, M. F. (2015). Evaluating handedness measures in spider monkeys. Animal Cognition, 18, 345–353.Google Scholar
Neuliep, J. W., & Crandall, R. (1990). Editorial bias against replication research. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 5, 85–90.Google Scholar
Nissen, S. B., Magidson, T., Gross, K., & Bergstrom, C. T. (2016). Publication bias and the canonization of false facts. ELife, 5, e21451.Google Scholar
Nosek, B. A., & Errington, T. M. (2020). What is replication? PLOS Biology, 18, e3000691.Google Scholar
Open Science Collaboration, O. S. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349, aac4716.Google Scholar
Palmer, A. R. (2000). Quasi-replication and the contract of error: Lessons from sex ratios, heritabilities and fluctuating asymmetry. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 31, 441–480.Google Scholar
Peterson, D. (2016). The baby factory: Difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius, 2, 2378023115625071.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prinz, F., Schlange, T., & Asadullah, K. (2011). Believe it or not: How much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets? Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 10, 712–712.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, S., & Pashler, H. (2000). How persuasive is a good fit? A comment on theory testing. Psychological Review, 107, 358–367.Google Scholar
Rowe, C., & Healy, S. D. (2014). Measuring variation in cognition. Behavioral Ecology, 25, 1287–1292.Google Scholar
Schank, J. C., & Koehnle, T. J. (2009). Pseudoreplication is a pseudoproblem. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 123, 421–433.Google Scholar
Schauer, J. M., & Hedges, L. V. (2020a). Reconsidering statistical methods for assessing replication. Psychological Methods, 26, 127–139.Google Scholar
Schauer, J. M., & Hedges, L. V. (2020b). Assessing heterogeneity and power in replications of psychological experiments. Psychological Bulletin, 146, 701–719.Google Scholar
Scheel, A. M., Schijen, M., & Lakens, D. (2020). An excess of positive results: Comparing the standard psychology literature with registered reports [preprint]. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
Scheel, M. H., Shaw, H. L., & Gardner, R. A. (2016). Incomparable methods vitiate cross-species comparisons: A comment on Haun, Rekers, and Tomasello (2014). Psychological Science, 27, 1667–1669.Google Scholar
Scheumann, M., & Zimmermann, E. (2008). Sex-specific asymmetries in communication sound perception are not related to hand preference in an early primate. BMC Biology, 6, 3.Google Scholar
Schmitt, V., Pankau, B., & Fischer, J. (2012). Old World monkeys compare to apes in the primate cognition test battery. PLoS ONE, 7, e32024.Google Scholar
Schubiger, M. N., Fichtel, C., & Burkart, J. M. (2020). Validity of cognitive tests for non-human animals: Pitfalls and prospects. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1835.Google Scholar
Schubiger, M. N., Kissling, A., & Burkart, J. M. (2016). How task format affects cognitive performance: A memory test with two species of New World monkeys. Animal Behaviour, 121, 33–39.Google Scholar
Silk, J. B., Roberts, E. R., Städele, V., & Strum, S. C. (2018). To grunt or not to grunt: Factors governing call production in female olive baboons, Papio anubis. PLoS ONE, 13, e0204601.Google Scholar
Simonsohn, U., Nelson, L. D., & Simmons, J. P. (2014). P-curve: A key to the file-drawer. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 534–547.Google Scholar
Skinner, B. F. (1956). A case history in scientific method. American Psychologist, 11, 221–233.Google Scholar
Smith, J. D., Couchman, J. J., & Beran, M. J. (2012). The highs and lows of theoretical interpretation in animal-metacognition research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367, 1297–1309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, P. L., & Little, D. R. (2018). Small is beautiful: In defense of the small-N design. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 2083–2101.Google Scholar
Stegenga, J. (2009). Robustness, discordance, and relevance. Philosophy of Science, 76, 650–661.Google Scholar
Stegenga, J. (2011). Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 42, 497–507.Google Scholar
Teufel, C., Hammerschmidt, K., & Fischer, J. (2007). Lack of orienting asymmetries in Barbary macaques: Implications for studies of lateralized auditory processing. Animal Behaviour, 73, 249–255.Google Scholar
van Rooij, I., & Baggio, G. (2020). Theory before the test: How to build high-verisimilitude explanatory theories in psychological science. PsyArXiv.Google Scholar
Vonk, J., & Krause, M. (2018). Editorial: Announcing preregistered reports. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 5, i–ii.Google Scholar
Wahlsten, D., Metten, P., Phillips, T. J., Boehm, S. L., Burkhart-Kasch, S., Dorow, J., Doerksen, S., Downing, C., Fogarty, J., Rodd-Henricks, K., Hen, R., McKinnon, C. S., Merrill, C. M., Nolte, C., Schalomon, M., Schlumbohm, J. P., Sibert, J. R., Wenger, C. D., Dudek, B. C., & Crabbe, J. C. (2003). Different data from different labs: Lessons from studies of gene–environment interaction. Journal of Neurobiology, 54, 283–311.Google Scholar
Wallace, E. K., Altschul, D., Körfer, K., Benti, B., Kaeser, A., Lambeth, S., Waller, B. M., & Slocombe, K. E. (2017). Is music enriching for group-housed captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)? PLoS ONE, 12, e0172672.Google Scholar
Yarkoni, T. (2019). The generalizability crisis. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jqw35Google Scholar
Zwaan, R. A., Etz, A., Lucas, R. E., & Donnellan, M. B. (2018). Making replication mainstream. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e120.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×