What should comparative cognition expect from direct replication studies?

Farrar, Benjamin G.; Clayton, Nicky

doi:10.31234/osf.io/4urm8

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Because data collection is costly and the current publishing model does not value null results, researchers might be tempted to look for "significance" in the data to increase the likelihood of publication. Combined with a low rate of replication studies (only 2% of studies in our sample attempted to replicate findings with comparable methodology in an independent sample from the original study), and even fewer would be expected to replicate successfully (Farrar & Clayton, 2019). In the following, we present the ManyPrimates project as an attempt to overcome some of these issues.…”

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

Preprint

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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%

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

Primates¹,

Beran²,

Bohn³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Another but less common approach was to carry out systematic comparisons, but typically limited to two species, mostly testing the cognitive performance of pairs of closely related species in a single cognitive test (Auersperg, Gajdon, & von Bayern, 2012). Early on, however, voices rose and questioned the field of comparative psychology, provocatively asking what was comparative of comparative cognition (Beach, 1950;Chittka, Rossiter, Skorupski, & Fernando, 2012;Macrì & Richter, 2015;Shettleworth, 2009) or more recent criticisms see (Farrar & Clayton, 2019;Farrar & Ostojic, 2019, also see Figure S1 in online supplemental materials), and emphasising the lack and need of a systematic cross-species comparisons that would take both phylogeny and ecology into account (Auersperg et al, 2012;MacLean et al, 2012). This discussion has been ongoing ever since.…”

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confidence: 99%

Comparative cognition: Practical shortcomings and some potential ways forward.

Krasheninnikova

Chow

Bayern

2020

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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The objectives in the field of comparative cognition are clear; efforts are devoted to revealing the selection pressures that shape the brains and cognitive abilities of different species and understanding cognitive processes in differently structured brains. However, our progress on reaching these objectives is slow, mostly because of several major practical challenges. In this review, we discuss 2 major shortcomings: (a) the poor systematics and low magnitude of the phylogenetic comparisons made, and (b) the weak comparability of the results caused by interfering species-specific confounding factors (perceptual, motivational, and morphological) alongside an insufficient level of standardisation of the methodologies. We propose a multiple-level comparative approach that emphasises the importance of achieving more direct comparisons within taxonomic groups at genus or family level as the first step before comparing between distantly related groups. We also encourage increasing interdisciplinary efforts to execute “team-science” approach in building a systematic and direct large-scale phylogenetic comparisons of bigger cognitive test batteries that produce reliable species-representative data. We finally revisit some existing suggestions that allow us to maximise standardisation while minimising species-specific confounding factors.

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What should comparative cognition expect from direct replication studies?

Abstract: This pre-print discusses what comparative cognition should expect when performing direct replication studies, and the issues it will face in performing and interpreting them.

Cited by 2 publications

References 48 publications

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

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

Comparative cognition: Practical shortcomings and some potential ways forward.

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