ManyPrimates 2: Delay of Gratification

How to contribute?

ManyPrimates is a platform for promoting large scale collaboration and open science practices in primate cognition research. In this project (MP2), we will assess primates’ ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in order to receive a larger or better reward later on.

We are currently collecting data for this project!
Deadline to contribute data: December 31, 2023
Get in touch if you have any questions about the timeline

1. Get in touch

The first step is to write an email to manyprimates@gmail.com, stating how you would like to contribute. There are many different ways besides data collection to contribute to a ManyPrimates project and you can find details about the types of contributions in our authorship guidelines.

If you are planning to collect data, please state in your email the species and number of subjects per species you are planning to contribute and which MP2 experiment(s) you would like to contribute to.

Make sure that our ethics guidelines apply to your site and obtain approval by your relevant ethics committee before you collect any data. Please note that MP2 will be open to researchers who do not conduct invasive research of any kind. If you have any questions about ethics or specific ethical constraints, please reach out to the coordination team before you start collecting data.

If you haven’t already, join our Slack workspace. Slack is a messaging tool we use for asking questions as well as for discussions and coordination.

2. Implement the setup and the procedure

We will create a dedicated folder for your test site that includes helpful templates and that you can use to submit your files to. One of these templates is for a short description of your site. Please fill it out before you start collecting data. If you contributed to an earlier study, review and update the description of your site.

Once you hear back from the coordination team, you can start to implement the procedure and make a short video clip of the setup and the procedure. There is no need to have a (non-human) primate subject present for this. Upload the video to your site folder, send an email to notify us (please send this email to Manon Schweinfurth), and the coordination team will take a look at the video and give you feedback before you start data collection (we want to to make sure that there are no ambiguities and ensure consistency in how everyone collects data). Please reach out if you have any questions!

If pre-recording a video is not possible (e.g. because you work in a remote field site), please get in touch with the coordination team to fully finalize your methods before data collection.

3. Collect the data

Now you can start collecting data! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with the coordination team if something comes up during the data collection.

4. Code and upload the data

Please use the datasheet template and instructions included in your folder to code your data. It’s really important that you only enter the kind of values that are in the template for each column. This will make merging the (hopefully many) datasets much easier. If something is unclear, please get in touch with the coordination team. You can either enter your data directly into the Google Sheets version online or you can download the Excel version, enter your data offline, and upload the spreadsheet back into your folder when you’re done.

At the end of data collection, don’t forget to get interobserver reliability coding for at least 20% of trials. The reliability coder should be naive with respect to the hypotheses of this study. If you are unsure how to run such interobserver reliability or have trouble finding someone to do reliability coding, get in touch with the coordination team.

ManyPrimates is committed to open science. That is, all our procedures and analysis are pre-registered. Furthermore, all data files and analysis scripts will be freely available in a public repository and all papers will be published in open access journals.

5. Contribute to analysis and writing

We hope you also contribute to the analysis and writing and you may do so even if you have not contributed data to this project. If you want to be part of the analysis team or want to contribute to writing, please get in touch with the coordination team. Here are some additional resources for the study:

Here are some additional resources for the study:

Thank you for being one of ManyPrimates!

MP2 coordination team
manyprimates@gmail.com