Trialling Meta-Research in Comparative Cognition: Claims and Statistical Inference in Animal Physical Cognition.

ABSTRACT: Scientific disciplines face concerns about replicability and statistical inference, and these concerns are also relevant in animal cognition research. This paper presents a first attempt to assess how researchers make and publish claims about animal physical cognition, and the statistical inferences they use to support them. We surveyed 116 published experiments from 63 papers on physical cognition, covering 43 different species. The most common tasks in our sample were trap-tube tasks (14 papers), other tool use tasks (13 papers), means-end understanding and string-pulling tasks (11 papers), object choice and object permanence tasks (9 papers) and access tasks (5 papers). This sample is not representative of the full scope of physical cognition research; however, it does provide data on t

SUBMITTER: Farrar BG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7115978 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature