Due to their advanced cognitive capability, complex social behaviors, and closer similarity to humans, nonhuman primates (NHP) offer several advantages as animal models for neuroscience and biomedical research. Over the past decades, NHP research has provided many critical insights into neuronal mechanisms underlying cognitive functions and brain disease. However, NHP research is still far from realizing its full potential. Mainstream NHP studies are still conducted in confined laboratory spaces with simplistic tasks that hardly reproduce their natural environments and significantly hinder the investigation of advanced cognitive phenomena, such as memory, multisensory integration, cognitive states, and social decisions. The design of studies on complex cognition that use more naturalistic conditions makes better use of the advantages offered by NHP. Furthermore, studies of NHP in their natural settings particularly help us better understand their innate behaviors and probe stereotyped deviations associated with different neurodevelopmental or psychological disorders.

Several practical difficulties hinder the studies of advanced cognition in NHP models in naturalistic conditions. The primary limitation is methodological, including experimental design and data acquisition and analysis. However, several technological advances have significantly expanded the ability to investigate internal cognitive states and naturalistic behavior in restrained and unrestrained NHPs, including automatic 3D behavioral tracking and analysis systems, wireless high-density electrode arrays and recording devices, virtual-reality settings, enclosure-based experiment systems, and new imaging methods to record natural sensory scenes. Also, we are closer to probing the neural circuits underlying cognitive behavior in naturalistic contexts, thanks to the availability of novel mathematical analysis methods, high-dimensionality data statistics, dimension-reduction techniques, and computational modeling.

Our research topic aims to provide an arena for reviewing accumulated knowledge, disseminating the latest research, and highlighting promising innovations in NHP research on dynamic cognition under naturalistic contexts. In addition, we hope this arena will catalyze exciting and insightful discussions and help future directions in this research domain.

We welcome different forms of original articles, reviews, and perspectives in our scope of NHP studies in naturalistic conditions. We are particularly interested in research articles and methods-based articles addressing the following topics:

1) Behavioral and neurophysiological studies in NHP that consider their dynamic, internal cognitive states under natural contexts (e.g., motivation, attention, social environment, development)

2) Behavioral and electrophysiological studies on freely moving NHP in their enclosure

3) NHP experiments utilizing naturalistic stimuli to study sensory encoding, motor control, or cognitive processes

4) NHP studies comparing experimental results obtained under restrained, redundant setup against those carried out in more naturalistic conditions

5) Computational modeling of neural mechanisms or behaviors considering natural contexts or naturalistic stimuli

6) New analysis tools or related technologies facilitating NHP studies of the neural mechanisms in natural contexts.

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