Conducting Publishable Research From Special Populations: Studying Children and Non-human Primates With Undergraduate Research Assistants

Childers, Jane B.; Phillips, Kimberley A.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01030

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…These issues likely arise not because researchers do not want to study a broad range of species, each with a sufficiently large sample size, but because they lack the infrastructure to do so. Data collection with primates is inherently costly (Childers & Phillips, 2019;Conlee, Hoffeld, & Stephens, 2004), limiting the number of animals and sites involved in a study. This issue also creates an incentive to use so-called "questionable research practices" (John, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2012).…”

Section: State Of the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative open science as a way to reproducibility and new insights in primate cognition research

Primates¹,

Beran²,

Bohn³

et al. 2019

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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. We conducted a systematic review of primate cognition research published between 2014 and 2019 to quantify the extent of this problem. Across 574 studies, the median sample size was 7 individuals. Less than 15% of primate species were studied at all, and only 19% of studies included more than one species. Further, the species that were studied varied widely in how much research attention they received, partly because a small number of test sites contributed most of the studies. These results suggest that the generalizability of primate cognition studies may be severely limited. Publication bias, questionable research practices, and a lack of replication attempts may exacerbate these problems. We describe the ManyPrimates project as one approach to overcoming some of these issues by establishing an infrastructure for large-scale collaboration in primate cognition research. Building on similar initiatives in other areas of psychology, this approach has already yielded one of the largest and most diverse primate samples to date and enables us to ask many research questions that can only be addressed through collaboration.

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Section: State Of the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%