Ready Player One? Virtual environments as a tool for studying spatial cognition in nonhuman primates

E. Rapport Munro et al. (see record 2025-97294-001) report on their use of a computerized task designed to mimic some aspects of the natural movements of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) around a virtual environment. Although far from being a great ape's real-life version of Ready Player One, this software offers a beginning point toward making more ecologically valid and natural environment-like settings for use in assessing spatial cognition and decision making. The continued refinement and use of tasks like those designed by Rapport Munro et al. (2025) is not exciting solely because such tasks will replace two-dimensional, third-person computerized tasks usedwith nonhuman animals or because it guarantees that the subjects who are engaging those tasks are genuinely feeling as if they are in real spaces. It is exciting because it is, yet again, a new tool being added to the toolbox available to comparative cognition researchers, and one that is going to be particularly valuable in asking and answering certain kinds of questions about how animals move through and represent spaces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).