I am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so...
@psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social

We are excited for the interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Ghana starting next week! Supported by the Bridging Minds Program @maxplanck.de, organized by researchers from MPI-EVA, including @hannahrausch.bsky.social and @mariepadberg.bsky.social. More info:
www.eva.mpg.de/events/2025-...

I was so lucky to be part of the perspective taking symposium of this year’s Behaviour conference in Kolkata. I presented my last paper showing that great apes, especially infants, are influenced by the false beliefs of a human bystander. Great questions, great talks, great conference!

When an animals' groupmates go out of sight, do they also go out of mind?

In a new paper in Proc B @royalsocietypublishing.org, Luz Carvajal and I show that a bonobo (Kanzi) can keep mental tabs on the whereabouts of multiple hidden social partners

royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/4GI7G...

Our results aim to inform current debates about early belief simulation (Baillargeon et al., 2018), its developmental trajectory (Grosse-Wiesmann & Southgate, 2024) and its evolution in human and nonhuman great apes.

This developmental pattern resembles closely the one found in humans. We conclude that the susceptibility to altercentric influences is not a uniquely human feature but is deeply rooted in great ape cognition.

While we found that even adult apes were influenced in their search behaviour by the false belief of a bystander, replicating the findings by Lurz et al., (2022), we show that infant apes were influenced the strongest.

When it rains, it pours. Happy to share my latest first-author publication in Animal Behaviour investigating the ontogenetic development of altercentric influences in great apes www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

These patterns highlight how both cultural context and information source shape strategy updating, with important implications for understanding learning and adaptation across cultural development. Congratulations to everyone involved—especially to the 1st author Wilson Vieira for this hard work!

Culture and age matter. We observed developmental differences: flexibility decreased with age in BaYaka children, but the opposite pattern emerged among German children. Overall, German kids were more flexible than their Congolese peers.

Social learning can suppress flexibility. When children learned solutions by watching others, they were more likely to stick with old strategies—even when better options emerged.

Thrilled to share our latest open-access study published in Scientific Reports! We examined how social versus asocial learning influences children’s ability to override previously learned strategies across three cultural settings—BaYaka, Bandongo, and Germany: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human cognition is often altercentric, and human infants seem to have an altercentric bias. Is this cognitive stance uniquely human or might it be shared with other species? There are arguments both ways and we explore them in this paper.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New student exchange program @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social fosters collaboration between young researchers from Germany & #Namibia. By exploring how #culture shapes #child development, the program enhances research in #psychology & provides unique training opportunities. 🌍 www.mpg.de/24711207/051...

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

🎊Fully funded PhD position on cooperative sustainability🌳

Are you curious about
🧒 developmental,
🌍 cross-cultural
🦧 species comparative
research on cooperative sustainability?

All info here or dm me with questions!
career2.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...
Please share! 🙏

New paper alert 👇 We present a new two-action sequential coordination task designed to investigate co-representation non-human primates. In collaboration with @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social and Josep Call and out now, fully #openaccess in PLoS One! (1/4)
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Our new paper is out!

We found #orangutans develop #nest-building skills through observational #sociallearning, #selectiveattention
to“know-how” and transmission of“know-what” information.
🦧🦧🦧🦧
#academicsky
#primates
#science
#biologicalscience
#warwickpsych

🦧🦧🦧🦧
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

🚨 New chapter alert 🚨 What can variation in great ape communication—across individuals, dyads, populations, species—tell us about language origins and communicative flexibility? 🦧🤷‍♂️ My latest piece w/ Carel van Schaik is out now in the OH of Approaches to Language Evolution.
doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

New preprint w/ @christophvoelter.bsky.social et al.

Individual differences in great ape cognition across time and domains: stability, structure, and predictability

48 apes 🦍, 10 tasks 🧠, 10 sessions📊, 1.5 y📅
✅ Stable individual traits
❌ No g-factor
🤝 Social ≠ non-social

🔗: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper alert!

Bonobos are often cited as the 'most empathic ape' yet a comparison to their chimp cousins has never been done. So we directly compared their consolation tendencies

We found big overlaps between the two species plus considerable within-species variation

open-access link below!

I'm looking for a PhD Student at the intersection of Machine Learning and Developmental Psychology.

We study everyday experiences in children from 🇰🇪🇩🇪🇹🇷 and use ML models to quantify interactions.

4 years, fully funded, great team, beautiful location. Please share and apply!

tinyurl.com/2mafdyh4

While adult apes remembered the object better when it was associated with a social stimulus, infant apes showed no such memory improvements. However, after a 2-day delay, the social memory effect of the adults disappeared.