People – “Rational, resolute, researcher”
Presenting the members of our steering committee: Prof. Josep Call, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, Scotland
1. Please describe yourself using 3 words that start with an R.
Rational, resolute, researcher
2. What was your motivation to become an NRP 79 Steering Committee member?
A willingness to serve the field by giving back some of my time to help early-career researchers make progress in their respective fields.
3. How do you implement the 3R principles in your daily work?
I am a comparative psychologist interested in the cognitive abilities of animals, particularly primates and dogs. The questions we seek to answer prevent us from Replacing the species that we study because we are looking for idiosyncrasies and commonalities among them. However, we Reduce our samples substantially because we routinely reuse the same animals for multiple studies. This approach, when implemented over a substantial period of time, provides valuable insights into the development and structure of the animals’ various cognitive abilities. As regards Refinement, we are constantly developing new protocols and fine-tuning existing ones in our work. Furthermore, our work contributes to the wellbeing of dogs and primates, serving as a form of environmental enrichment that enables them to ‘forage’ for a few hours per day to obtain food items should they choose to do so.
The nature of this work is noninvasive. That is, in our work, we either do not touch the animals (primates) or when we touch them, no procedure is involved. Crucially, subjects in our studies participate on a voluntary basis, and they can stop participating at any time. Moreover, we do not deprive them of food or water.
Main fields of expertise:
- Comparative psychology
- Animal cognition
- Primate cognition
- Comparative cognition
- Cognitive evolution