It has become increasingly, and sometimes frustratingly, clear that in the past few years some researchers working with non-human animals either have forgotten (or were never taught) the perils of inadvertent cuing. I wrote this article after completing another journal review in which the methodology involved an experimenter presenting two or more choices to an animal. The experimenter prepared the trial, presented it, watched the animal as it made its response, and then recorded that response. In this case, as in some others in our field, the test itself was creative, unique, and exciting, and the performance by the animals tested was adequate to suggest they might be doing something interesting and perhaps reflective of cognitive processing. But, the possibility that cuing might have occurred dampened my enthusiasm for the project, and dampened my spirits about the state and future of the field in general because too many papers get through the peer review process without having proper controls for cuing. In the interests of full disclosure, I cannot say I have always been perfect in preventing any chance of cuing in the tests I have done with animals, but I do worry that more and more often there is not even the recognition of the need to control for possible cuing in experiments assessing animal cognition.
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