How do nonhuman primates process information about their social and physical world, and how do they make decisions? To address this question, research in the tradition of ethology and behavioral ecology aims to uncover how animals behave under ecological and evolutionarily valid conditions. By combining detailed observations of behavior in the wild with field experimentation, such studies have shed light on what primates know about predators, their home ranges and food sources, and their social environment. A second research stream takes non-naturalistic experiments into freely moving groups of wild or captive primates to test social learning, problem-solving skills, and motivation. Finally, captivity-based studies address a wide range of questions, using an array of different methodological approaches, often with the aim to explore the limits of the animals’ abilities. This chapter compares the strengths and the limitations of the different research streams and proposes an integrative approach to developing a profound understanding of primate cognition.

>What is “experimental syntax”? One could reasonably argue that all syntax is experimental, in the sense that traditional syntactic research is based on series of small, informal experiments. On the other hand, one might understand “experimental syntax” to refer to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments that focus on the structure of sentences. In practice, though, the term “experimental syntax” is generally used to refer to the intersection of these two approaches: studies that focus on the varying acceptability of sentence types and explore this by means of formal experiments. The goal of the handbook is to review what we have learned in the area of experimental syntax, but also to make sense of what this new body of knowledge is telling us, understand how experimental studies relate to the study of syntax more broadly, and explore what type of work we should be doing as the field moves forward.

Although people have theorizing about memory for millennia, its careful experimental study began only in the late nineteenth century. Since then, its study has matured into one of the richest and most fully developed topics in psychological research. In this chapter, we present a historical survey of behavioral methods for studying human memory. We begin with the founders of two research traditions, Hermann Ebbinghaus and Frederic Bartlett. Their seminal research, based in laboratory and field methods, shaped how subsequent memory researchers conduct their science. We trace the evolution of memory research through several phases: the verbal learning tradition following Ebbinghaus, which was then broadened in the 1960s with studies of organization in memory and the information-processing tradition. We then continue with brief discussions of more contemporary research on working memory, episodic memory, autobiographical memory, and implicit memory, as well as social remembering. We also touch on the development of applied memory research in several realms. While early researchers attempted to find general laws governing all memory, 150 years of research have revealed no such laws. Rather, the tapestry of different but complementary research traditions has provided rich and continually growing insight into our understanding of human memory.