The hidden side of animal cognition research: Scientists’ attitudes toward bias, replicability and scientific practice

Abstract

Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field, but less so in their own work. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan’s canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses. Researchers self-reported that most of their studies had been published, however they often reported that studies went unpublished because they had negative or inconclusive results, or results that questioned “preferred” theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves—however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, 73.0% of respondents suggested areas of animal cognition research could experience a ‘replication crisis’ if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants’ free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, which are available as part of an open dataset. However, many researchers appeared concerned with how to interpret negative results, publication bias, theoretical bias and reliability in areas of animal cognition research. Collectively, these data provide a candid overview of barriers to progress in animal cognition and can inform debates on how individual researchers, as well as organizations and journals, can facilitate robust scientific research in animal cognition.

The Effects of Occupation, Education and Dwelling Place on Attitudes towards Animal Welfare in China

“…Scientists often use animals in their research and this may be essential for career progression, for which they tend to be highly motivated. Although they recognize questionable research practices in in a large proportion of other scientists, such as using research methods that harm animals, they themselves claim not to engage in these often [ 27 ]. The prevalence of questionable research practices depends on their discipline, with cognitive science and animal welfare science being two examples of disciplines where questionable research practices occur [ 27 , 28 ].…”

“…Although they recognize questionable research practices in in a large proportion of other scientists, such as using research methods that harm animals, they themselves claim not to engage in these often [ 27 ]. The prevalence of questionable research practices depends on their discipline, with cognitive science and animal welfare science being two examples of disciplines where questionable research practices occur [ 27 , 28 ]. Caution is necessary because of the small number of scientists respondents.…”

Visual perception of emotion cues in dogs: a critical review of methodologies

“…The problem of highly controlled and “aseptic” laboratory studies is that they might find effects that are of little relevance in the “real world” where many more variables are interacting with the experimental variables of interest. This can lead to problems of replicability, which are a concern not only in this area, but in the wider area of psychology (Farrar et al 2021 ; Open Science Collaboration 2015 ; Tecwyn 2021 ). Furthermore, it also means research is focused on what we can measure in the laboratory rather than what might be ecologically important.…”

Behavioral flexibility is manipulatable and it improves flexibility and problem solving in a new context: post-hoc analyses of the components of behavioral flexibility

“…The field of comparative cognition is strongly suspected to be in a replicability crisis, which calls into question the validity of the conclusions produced by this research (Brecht et al, 2021;Farrar, Boeckle, et al, 2020;Farrar, Altschul, et al, 2020;Farrar et al, 2021;Lambert et al, 2022;Tecwyn, 2021). The lack of replicability in experimental design, analyses, and results is, in part, because of the lack of clear theoretical frameworks (Frankenhuis et al, 2022), the resulting heavy reliance on measuring operationalized variables that are assumed to represent broad concepts, as well as small sample sizes (Farrar, Boeckle, et al, 2020).…”