AI Enters The Wild And Monkeys In A Costa Rica Forest Test Out New Technology
Abby A.
Somewhere in the Costa Rican rainforest, a group of monkeys has found a new pasttime. There, one hundred monkeys are patiently waiting their turn to use a new AI-powered device: CapuchinAI.
Primatologists and researchers, Dr. Marcela Benítez and doctoral student Federico Sánchez Vargas, and the Georgia Institute of Technology have been studying the development and deployment of CapuchinAI. In the Taboga Forest Reserve located in Costa Rica, the scientists ran the first tests during last summer, between July 2025 and August 2025. The scientists published first formal studies in the American Journal of Primatology on Tuesday, July 28, 2026.
CapuchinAI is a portable, battery-powered testing station gadget. It is equipped with a 15-inch touchscreen, a webcam, and an AI-powered facial recognition vision which was designed to safely and efficiently auto–generate thinking puzzle tasks and reward monkeys with dried banana slices. CapuchinAI bridges the gap between tightly-controlled laboratory experiments and unpredictable outdoor observations by combining facial recognition and touchscreen reward systems in the monkeys’ natural habitats. According to Emory University, CapuchinAI has a 97% accuracy. By bringing such advanced technology to the wild, now scientists can study how environmental variations and individual life experiences shape primary intelligence and how they evolve.
Prototyped in Costa Rica’s Taboga Forest Reserve, the wild white-faced capuchin monkeys quickly and willingly learned the touchscreen reward system without any human intervention, which was very impressive to many experts.
A majority of the financial support came from The National Institute on Drug Abuse, also known as the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Additional funding came from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research and The Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture.
This project was to honor the late Frans De Waal who passed away in 2024. Frans De Waal was also the former director of Emory’s Living Links Center. De Waal focused on individuals, and he treated each and every animal as themselves with their own personalities. This new technology aims to spot those individual thinking differences in primates.
Originally, the design of this AI-powered device was only extremely accurate for 6 monkeys. However, Costa Rica houses around 100 monkeys, so they had to figure out a way to make sure all monkeys got recognized without needing to make more devices. The solution to this was simple, and they changed the script to recognize any monkey.
SOURCES USED!!!
https://app.letterly.io/api/letterly/documents/view?url=letterly%2Fdocuments%2Flink%2F86518
https://news.emory.edu/features/2026/07/ai-opens-new-era-cognitive-studies-wild-primates
