A wooden box bolted to a platform in a Costa Rican forest can spot a capuchin monkey’s face and choose a puzzle suited to that individual. Get the answer right, and a slice of banana pops out. Nobody has to stand there and run the test. Wild primates are usually studied one of two ways: in controlled laboratory settings or watched loose in the trees with almost no experimental control. Researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology built a new system to close that gap. Marcela Benítez, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory, led the project, which the team calls CapuchinAI. She has spent years studying monkey behavior both in captivity and in the wild, and she wanted a way to bring lab-grade precision into the forest itself. “The primate brain didn’t evolve in a lab, it evolved in complex, competitive environments,” said Benítez. “Yet primate cognition is rarely studied in the wild because the experimental control needed to measure cognition is difficult in unpredictable environments.” The team first needed a computer that could tell one capuchin from another. They adapted an open-source facial-recognition program called YOLO. Then they trained it on thousands of close-up photos and videos of six adult male capuchins living at the Taboga Forest Reserve. Undergraduates at both universities spent hours drawing boxes around each monkey’s face in old field footage and tagging every image with the correct name. The team tested the finished model on pictures it had never seen, some blurred or lit differently than the training photos. It detected a capuchin’s face in the frame 98 percent of the time, and when it did, it identified the correct monkey 97 percent of the time. Federico Sánchez Vargas, an Emory PhD student in anthropology and the paper’s first author, took