The 14th Colloquium of Ecological Future Making of Childrearing

Our cognitive models suffer from issues in replicability and predictive power because our picture of what intelligence is for humans and the animal kingdom is biased and incomplete. We need new data, different data, to build our models. Yet venturing outside the lab to study cognition in the wild remains rare and when done it often relies on less than optimal tools to measure such diversity, where diversity is self-reported rather than observed or measured. Towards providing a more solid base for our empirical models, we have collected extensive data on social interaction and social cognition cross-ages, cross-cultures and cross-species, because of an interest in bringing evolution, diversity, individual differences and change to the forefront of Cognitive Science. Along the way we started the largest citizen science study on animal communication (10,000 dogs and 700 cats tracked longitudinally in 47 countries), tested with the same paradigm children in urban vs. rural settings, conducted behavioral studies on several animal species (from great apes to macaques to baboons to dogs, cats, rats and goats), created the largest longitudinal video dataset of baby apes and developed novel tools to measure behavior by combining computer vision, robotics and cognitive science. In this talk I will report among others, on primate data collected in the Republic of Congo, the DRC and Kenya and share some of the things we have learned along the way: from the importance of taking seriously individual differences, life history and relationships to how to minimize the chances of being chased by lions before you complete your study.