While animal cognition researchers may look strange at playing parrot vocalizations on loud speakers in the jungle or presenting gorillas with trays of colored shapes, there very much is a method to our madness. That method is the scientific method whose steps are to develop a research question, design appropriate methodologies, collect and analyze data, then share the findings with the scientific community. This chapter presents some considerations and methods for studying animal cognition with the hope that, the reader will use some of them in their future observations of animal behavior—both human and nonhuman. Animal cognition is a branch of psychology, the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. Some of the most famous and informative studies of animal cognition have been through the case study method. Most animal cognition research is conducted by scientists who are affiliated with colleges and universities.

The rise of social media and popular press articles on the Internet has done wonders to make the field of animal cognition more visible and accessible to those outside of academia. In addition to animal cognition findings being used to change how we legally treat and view animals, the field of animal cognition has ushered in an exciting shift in the value of the work. Not everyone in animal cognition’s history has subscribed to practice of a diverse interdisciplinary perspective, and especially not psychologists who were trained and working during the behaviorist movement. Humans have changed the planet in the last few hundred years into something that is almost unrecognizable. For a long time, feelings of human superiority prevented us from learning about other species for the sake of learning about them. This concluding chapter discusses technological advancements; interdisciplinary collaborations; and human induced rapid environmental change.

Personality and emotional well-being are features of an animal’s behavior that are very real but have historically not been considered cognitive. Individual differences act as ever-present filters, influencing the cognitive processes that we have shared up to this point. Including this chapter at the end of the book should serve as to contextualize all of the findings. In the human psychology world, personality is considered someone’s enduring or stable, predictable ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving over time and across context. The chapter highlights some of the findings and methodological considerations that must be made at each of these stages. It provides multiple examples of how carefully researchers must work to ensure that the labels they assign to behaviors accurately reflect what they’re seeing, that the tasks themselves correspond to those labels, and that the labels say something about a particular core personality trait.