In the forests of northeastern Costa Rica, a small monkey named Pele approached a glowing screen mounted on a tree trunk. She touched the correct image. A few seconds later, a treat dropped into a container below. No human researcher was in sight — only a compact computer hidden in the brush, watching her face and tracking her choices.
This scene marks the beginning of a new era for scientists studying how primates think. Researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have built an AI system called CapuchinAI that can automatically test wild capuchin monkeys' intelligence using facial recognition and touchscreens. Their work was published in The American Journal of Primatology.
The Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica is now home to the first scalable, automated method for measuring cognition in wild primates. The system uses a battery-powered computer that recognizes individual monkeys, shows each one a learning puzzle tailored just for them, and delivers a food reward when they get it right.
The technology already performs impressively: CapuchinAI identifies individual capuchins with 97% accuracy after studying photos and videos of their faces. Undergraduate students helped train the system by carefully drawing boxes around monkey faces in field footage and labeling each one with the correct name — Pele, Pedro, Pio, and Pesto among them.
Marcela Benítez, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory and senior author of the paper, explained why this matters. "The primate brain didn't evolve in a lab, it evolved in complex, competitive environments," she said. "Yet primate cognition is rarely studied in the wild because the experimental control needed to measure cognition is difficult in unpredictable environments." CapuchinAI changes that equation.
The project builds on a scientific legacy stretching back to Frans de Waal, the legendary primatologist who died in 2024. De Waal pioneered studies of animal cognition and wrote bestselling books that showed the world how smart and emotionally rich primate lives can be.
Federico Sánchez Vargas, an Emory doctoral student who led the research, said the new method lets scientists explore "the minds behind the personalities" — understanding not just what monkeys do, but how each individual's unique life experiences shaped the way they think.
The team has made their system open-source, publishing detailed blueprints and coding guides so other scientists can adapt the technology to study different primate species in other wild environments. Benítez is also co-director of Capuchinos de Taboga, a research project that has tracked the local capuchin population since 2017 in partnership with Costa Rica's Universidad Nacional Técnica.
In the Taboga Forest, the monkeys keep coming back to the screens. They learn fast, form their own routines, and reveal, one correct answer at a time, what wild thinking really looks like.