Lab cognition going wild: Implementing a new portable touchscreen system in vervet monkeys

Abstract

1. Touchscreen technology has provided researchers with opportunities to conduct wellcontrolled cognitive tests with captive animals, allowing researchers to isolate individuals, select participants based on specific traits, and control aspects of the environment.2. In this study, we aimed to investigate the potential utility of touchscreen technology for the study of cognition in wild vervet monkeys. We assessed the viability of touchscreen testing by comparing rates of participation between wild and sanctuary-housed vervets. Additionally, we compared performance on a simple associative learning task in order to verify that wild participants are able to engage meaningfully with a touchscreen task presented in their natural environment.3. We presented eight groups of vervet monkeys (four wild and four sanctuary groups, totalling 240 individuals) with a portable touchscreen device. The touchscreen displayed tasks in which food rewards could be gained by touching a stimulus displayed on the screen.We assessed individuals' likelihood of interacting with the touchscreen, their frequency of participation, and their performance on a simple associative learning task. 4. We found that sanctuary-housed monkeys were more likely to interact with the touchscreen. Participation in wild vervet monkeys was influenced by sex and age. However, monkeys in the two contexts (sanctuary versus wild) did not differ in their performance on a simple associative learning task.5. This study demonstrates that touchscreen technology can be successfully deployed in a population of wild primates. This gives us a starting point to test animal cognition under natural conditions that include varying group composition, environmental challenges, and ongoing activities such as foraging, which are challenging to recreate in captivity. While rates of participation were lower than those found in captivity, reasonable sample sizes can be achieved, and wild primates can successfully learn touchscreen tasks in a manner comparable to their captive counterparts.

Quantifying social roles in multi-animal videos using subject-aware deep-learning

“…The social behaviors of animals in the wild pose a significant challenge for computational analysis. Unlike controlled laboratory settings, the wild environment presents a multitude of variables, ranging from environmental factors to unpredictable behavioral dynamics [36][37][38] . Moreover, the inconsistency in recording locations and the low chances of encountering the wild animals can make the videos highly variable and low in quantity.…”

Striking pay dirt: Contemporary methods for studying animal sociality in the wild

“…Instead, ethical considerations should push researchers to develop their research protocols in view of limiting their impact on wild animals, while still extracting as much information as they can at one time, to avoid the need to re‐expose animals indefinitely. Crucially, the methods presented in this Special Feature will all facilitate this, be it by automatizing feeders (Harrison et al, 2023; Wild et al, 2022), or by making extensive use of remote sensing (He et al, 2022; King & Jensen, 2022; Mannion et al, 2022; Sarabian et al, 2023) thus showing that the study of sociality in the wild is not incompatible with the use of contemporary methods. In fact, such methods should be tested to explore the limits of their use on different species and produce reasonable do‐or‐do not guidelines that can guide the design and implementation of future research.…”

“…Importantly, they also discuss the impact of drones in terms of animal disturbance, which we will come back to in our final paragraph. Introducing technology to animals can also be done by presenting touchscreens to animals, as demonstrated by Harrison et al (2023). Crucially, the use of touchscreens is a tool of choice in captive studies, allowing one to implement similar paradigms as in captivity but with the beneficial ecological validity of wild subjects.…”

Editorial: Recent Advances in Animal Cognition and Ethology

“…This approach ensures that the horses’ welfare is upheld while contributing valuable insights into their visual discrimination skills. Touchscreen can now be used with a large panel of species [ 36 , 37 ] and into the wild [ 3 , 38 ]. The passive acoustic monitoring of marmosets in a noisy mining environment prioritised the animals’ well-being [ 21 ].…”