Young chimps play weird with tools and other objects & this can lead to innovation! Moss sponging, doll play, leaf clipping to ask for carrying. If copied and retained, rare kid innovations can contribute to cultural complexity 🧪🔬🐵 My fav article I've ever worked on: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The FameLab Swiss final is happening tomorrow, 24th Sept at 6pm! Live stream www.youtube.com/live/jIc30Fq... In person, free entry in the Aula, 1st floor, PROGR in Bern (Waisenhauspl. 30, 3011 Bern). See you tomorrow 🤗 #famelab #sciencecommunication #talkingscience #primates #primatology

Just in: insect application to wounds happens also in East African chimpanzees: share.google/WwKqxSy4t0e2...

Important new work (from Elisa Bandini, @ctennie.bsky.social, @sofiaforss.bsky.social et al.) addressing an elephant in the room - how weird are our weirdest apes, and how is that skewing research efforts? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🚨What is behavioral innovativeness? And how can we make sense of claims that individuals or taxa are 'more innovative' than others? In their new EJPS paper, Grant Ramsey & @andrameneganzin.bsky.social defend a novel, multidimensional & multilevel account of innovativeness.👇 #philsci #HPbio #evobio

Hi everyone, happy to share with all of you the paper from the second chapter of my PhD, where we show that more exploratory birds use a broader foraging niche, linking consistent behavior with ecological flexibility. I hope you can enjoy it and share it!!! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122 press release https://www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyond-the-alpha-male-150495-x?c=2249

🚨New article in Proc B: "Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies" Using agent-based evolutionary models, we show that reciprocity emerges more reliably in competitive environments with high exploitation risk. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

We have a new paper out in @cp-iscience.bsky.social reporting that more socially integrated female chimpanzees have lower offspring mortality 🧪 #evosky #primates #primatology #anthropology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper in @behavecol.bsky.social (link: academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...) led by PhD student @marcofele.bsky.social using hard-won data from our amazing baboon team. Our @swanseauni.bsky.social press release: www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office... We introduce the idea of a "social spandrel".....

🚨CogSci preprint alert🚨 When you look at reviews, do you like to focus on positive or negative ones? @stepalminteri.bsky.social, @thecharleywu.bsky.social and I set out to investigate how learning rate biases differ between individual and social learning in our new study. osf.io/bcrw9_v2 🧵 below!

Had a fantastic #pintofscience night in Baden! 🌟 Sharing stories of curiosity & sociality in humans and non-human primates with laughs, interactions, and great questions. This is why I do science communication to spark curiosity and make science joyful. 🐒 Massive thanks to organizers!

Great opportunity! If you are interested in it, please check the links below the original post.

Updated the reinforcement (+social) learning models in my cultural evolution agent-based modelling in R tutorial. Now uses cmdstan rather than rstan (and more importantly now works again). On github (Model 17): github.com/amesoudi/cul... and bookdown: bookdown.org/amesoudi/ABM...

Don't miss Pint of Science Switzerland. See you in... Baden! 📍Kulturhaus Royal - Baden, Bahnhofstrasse 39 📆20 May - 6.30PM 🎤Talks in 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 🎟️FREE ENTRY Program: pintofscience.ch/event/scienc... @pintsworld.bsky.social #PintCH #Pint25 @uzh-ch.bsky.social @fnhw.bsky.social

New paper alert 📢 Young wild chimpanzees from the @taichimpproject.bsky.social show attachment types with their mothers similar to human children. Only they do not display patterns related to disorganized attachment. Read our new paper in Nature Human Behavior www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm THRILLED that our book is out. This book, with other 60 contributors from across the globe (!!!) is a love letter to the science we want to do, and a how-to guide for how to do it. Please read it and share it!

Thrilled to have the 1st project in my @snsf-ch.bsky.social Ambizione fellowship in @pnas.org this week. With Vic Martignac, @samellisq.bsky.social and @savinggorillas.bsky.social we asked what is a good social environment for a gorilla? And the answer was complicated... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

phys.org/news/2025-05... Unravelling some of the complexity of animal cultures & conservation with @lucymaplin.bsky.social, @emma-carroll.bsky.social, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten, @ellengarland.bsky.social & contributors to our theme issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb... @royalsocietypublishing.org

Enjoyed reading @matteomameli.bsky.social's short book on 'human nature'. While I think that we should park the term 'human nature', Mameli correctly points out that how we think about 'human nature' influences how we think about ourselves. #philbio www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-human...

new preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/9055 Code used in research is key to the methods and scientific output and we should ensure it’s not just "available" but easy to verify and build on. We present a practical tool to code review for scientists 🧪 work with @animalecol-nioo.bsky.social

Here's an article we did for @theconversation.com about our new study looking at #empathy in chimpanzees and bonobos, and why we need to move beyond stereotypes theconversation.com/our-ape-cous...

New paper alert 🚨! Immature gibbons gradually develop their feeding behavior while taking the opportunity to socially learn from their mothers. Learn more by reading our paper! link.springer.com/article/10.1... #gibbon #sociallearning #ape #primates

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science: How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

New paper alert! - number 2 Social contagion underpins key elements of social interaction, including empathy & social learning. Here, we review research on primate social contagion and offer a unifying framework available open-access! 👇👇 w/ Georgia Sandars www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Chimps don’t share food all the time, so this behaviour with fermented fruit might be important..."

Rounding out the session, we have a great talk by Saein Lee talking about #conformity & #prosociality! ➡️ Comparing tight vs loose: Tighter cultures show more prosociality, only for behaviours, not self-report! 🌏 #ehbea2025 #SocialNorms @saeinlee.bsky.social

Bonobos refuse to cooperate when rewards are unfair, showing signs of inequity aversion. Their reactions hint at ancient roots of fairness in primate social life. #Anthropology #Primatology #Bonobos #Fairness #HumanEvolution

Excellent overview by @lukaskuderna.bsky.social highlighting the evolutionary insights that can be gained from complete ape genomes (fantastic resource paper in @nature.com just out) www.nature.com/articles/d41... “Complete sequencing of ape genomes”: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧬

A stellar new review on the natural history of sociality from Joan Silk: "Even in a world in which we can order groceries on the internet and work remotely, we depend on our connections to others for our well-being." nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/SETDFE... #Evolution #HBES

Happy to have a new piece in @science.org with my friend Lydia where we draw attention to the significance of animal material culture for understanding human technical evolution and why we should digitally preserve and protect primate tools and tool use sites. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New scientist article on the culture debate (paywalled): www.newscientist.com/article/mg26... Note that the title of the piece is a bit of a mismatch to the differentiating text [I imagine an editor chose the title, not the author].

New Paper Alert: Why do chimpanzees have large tool kits? with @taichimpproject.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42... We found that like humans, chimpanzees seek social learning opportunities throughout their first decade of life, particularly for tool use.

Check out our new paper about the #development of #metacognition in rhesus #monkeys, lead by Yiyun Huang! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

More on open endedness in human culture (see also e.g. here: arxiv.org/abs/2203.130...). But note: open ended culture wouldnt exist without (special) cumulative culture. Btw the first time I heard someone use this term in conjunction with human culture it was by Alex Kacelnik (maybe 2014? Unsure)

Thanks to @salonnewsroom.bsky.social for the great excerpt from Nicole Karlis's YOUR BRAIN ON ALTRUISM: The Power of Connection and Community during Times of Crisis: "Primate and neuroscience studies tell us a lot about how evolution rewards kindness and cooperation": www.salon.com/2025/03/16/a...

Connectivity profile and function of ‘unique’ human cortical areas. Very nice comparative work by Katherine Bryant, Rogier Mars and collaborators @neuroecologylab.bsky.social 👇🧪🧠

🚨 New paper 🚨 Out in @commspsychol.bsky.social: "Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation" with Claire Lugrin and @ccruff.bsky.social We use gaze data and display manipulations in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that these manipulations can drive choices through attention 👇

🚨 New preprint out! 🚨 How do people make moral judgments as third parties? 👀 We show how two motivations—inequality aversion (fair = moral) ⚖️ and the common-is-moral heuristic (frequent = moral 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧—interact to shape evaluations 🧵👇 📄 osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New paper: Chimpanzees explore just like us! 🐵🔍 Lou Haux @mpib-berlin.bsky.social shows that chimpanzees adapt their exploration strategies to changes in the environment—exploring more in unstable conditions. Now out in Nature Communications @naturecomms.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The looks great: “cross-cultural developmental research poses distinct problems for ensuring high construct validity, owing to the nuances of working with children; the standard approach of transporting protocols designed & validated in one population to another risks low construct validity”

Adult great apes show enhanced memory for social events phys.org/news/2025-02...

Amazing work!

Check out @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social, @juliamarshall.bsky.social, and Abby McLaughlin's new feature review in TICS! Beyond punishment: psychological foundations of restorative interventions: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

What can #chimpanzees clasping their hands teach us about human and non-human animal culture? Our study, published #openaccess in @royalsocietypublishing.org examines the role of communication in initiating this social custom, the grooming handclasp (GHC). doi.org/10.1098/rspb... a🧵 (1/10)

See you all in Utrecht in a month! I will present findings that show how norms shape prosociality across cultures. #cultureconference #prosociality

I strongly recommend DISI ☺️. It will make your summer unforgettable! #DISI2025

New paper out with @cedricboeckx.bsky.social and @ctennie.bsky.social: We discuss the role of explore-exploit tensions in shaping primate communication systems 🐵👶, integrating individual and social learning processes. Such a fun paper to write! bit.ly/40I7j4R

Our new paper on anterior prefrontal role of 'social metacognition' (projection of one's own introspection to imagine others' thought) is just out at Nature Communications rdcu.be/d6Tcg