Guest Editors
Jean-Baptiste Leca
University of Lethbridge, Department of Psychology; Adjunct Faculty, National Institute of Advanced Studies, School of Natural and Engineering Sciences
<p>Jean-Baptiste Leca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is also an Adjunct Faculty with the School of Natural and Engineering Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. Since his PhD in Ethology (2002) at the University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France, Jean-Baptiste has been conducting field research on the mechanisms and evolution of cultural behaviors in non-human primates.</p> <p>Jean-Baptiste primarily studies the modes of acquisition and expression of more or less functional and sometimes arbitrary forms of object manipulation (e.g., object exploration, object play, extractive foraging, physical and symbolic tool use) and non-conceptive sex (e.g., female-male mounting, same-sex sexual behavior, heterospecific sexually behavior, masturbation) that are socially influenced/learned and culturally maintained in several macaque species.</p> <p>He employs comparative, longitudinal, (field) experimental, and physiological approaches in his research, that intersect with disciplines such as Psychology, Ethology, Anthropology, Ecology, and Endocrinology.</p>
Richard Weil
University of Lethbridge, Department of Psychology
<p>Richard Weil is a PhD student who has a passion for animal behaviour and cognition studies in the wild specifically. He started off completing his BSc and MSc at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has worked on projects which focused on ecology, behaviour, and cognition of free-living animals in South Africa. He has worked with free-living animals like urban black-backed jackals, arid adapted African striped mice, and meerkats.</p> <p>He is currently completing his PhD in Evolution and Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is investigating the proximate and ultimate causes of material culture in non-human primates, specifically stone handling behaviour (a non-instrumental form of culturally maintained object manipulation) and tool use exhibited by free-ranging populations of macaques.</p>
Collection Overview
Grounded in the principles of the inductive method, research on the cognition of non-human animals has traditionally relied on two complementary approaches, each having inherent limitations. First, observational studies aim to describe specific behavior patterns spontaneously expressed by free-living subjects in natural environments. This methodology is high in external/ecological validity because it is implemented in real-life situations. However, it is low in internal validity because most variables cannot be controlled and manipulated, and as a result, evidence is largely correlational. Second, experimental studies aim to explain how certain behavioral responses are caused and predicted by environmental stimuli and cognitive processes. This methodology is high in internal validity because researchers can manipulate key variables under-well controlled conditions of laboratory settings. However, it is low in external/ecological validity because it is generally implemented on socially isolated lab-bred animals housed in artificial or standardized environments with a few simplified stimuli.
In this Methods collection, we present a hybrid paradigm, called “field experiments” or “outdoor laboratories”, that addresses these limitations by bridging the gap between these two approaches. By implementing minimally invasive experimental designs in the natural environment of free-living animals, field experiments are high in internal and external validity, and are used to produce results that are generalizable to real-world populations. We aim to gather different types of field experiments (e.g., predator stimuli, puzzle-boxes, playback, video demonstrations, transfers) that convincingly demonstrate how non-human animals acquire, process, retain, and use information to produce adaptive behaviors that contribute to solving problems of survival and reproduction.