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Studying animal cognition in the wild

Sometimes recording what animals do not do or fail to find can lead to revealing insights into their expectations, and thus cognition

Studying cognition in the wild is a challenge. Field researchers and their study animals face many factors that can easily interfere with their variables of interest and that many say are “impossible” to control for. A novel observational approach for field research developed by Karline Janmaat at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology can now guide young scholars, who want to study cognition in the field before this opportunity disappears.

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© Ammie Kalan