Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zurich
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz
ONGOING
RESEARCH
Emmy Noether Group Leader Grant, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
HE 9976/1-1, project number 550994438
«Understanding togetherness: Unravelling the evolutionary, developmental, and cultural foundation of human interaction” 1.614.796 €
Ambizione Group Leader Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
grant number 223809
“Nature versus nurture: A multidisciplinary approach to study how humans (have) become ultra-cooperative” 932.786 CHF
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellowship « JORIGINS », Horizon Europe, European Commission
HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01, grant number 101105532
“Building blocks of human sociality: A comparative assessment of joint actions in humans and their closest ape relatives” 173.847,36 €
CASCB Small Project Grant, Cluster of Excellence
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, “Gaze-follow framework under natural interaction conditions for non-human apes” 10.000 €
Collaborators: Prasetia Putra, Alex Chan, Fumihiro Kano
WHAT WE STUDY NOW
JOINT ACTION IN BONOBOS, CHIMPANZEES AND CHILDREN UNDER THREE SCOPES
EMOTIONS
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The role of emotions in joint action has for far too long been neglected in interaction research, especially so in early human development and in other great ape species closely related to us.
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Emotions are crucial indicators of joint action as they could provide information about whether individuals are involved in joint commitment– a quality claimed as uniquely human and that is difficult to attest in nonhuman animals.
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This study investigates emotional expressions arising in the process of joint action coordination in human children (3-4 y), bonobos and chimpanzees.
SYNCHRONY
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Interactional synchrony is theorized to be a powerful mechanism to facilitate coordination, trust, and cooperation in adult humans.
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This study will measure bodily synchrony during naturalistic joint activities of human children (3-4 y), bonobos and chimpanzees, and the degree to which this quality represents an affective mechanism that fosters joint commitment in the three species.
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Communicative repair is part of everyday human joint action. It pertains to the ability to fix communicative breakdowns, either by one’s initiative (self-initiated repair) or due to a recipient’s repair cue of misunderstanding/hearing (interactive repair).
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Typical human repair cues involve leaning forward (Rasmussen, 2014), moving eyebrows (Hömke et al., 2022), or saying “huh?” (Dingemanse et al., 2013).
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This study will comparatively investigate repair cues during spontaneous communicative exchanges in everyday joint actions of young children (3-4 y), bonobos and chimpanzees
REPAIR
DEVELOPMENT OF JOINT ACTION SKILLS IN CHIMPANZEES
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We also study how young chimpanzees develop social competence and critical joint action skills during their early ontogeny. This includes most of the above skills described on this page, yet with a specific focus on the developmental milestones.
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The goal is to understand whether chimpanzee joint action development resembles that of human development, and/or what differences there are in this respect.
IMPLEMENTING NEW METHODS
GAZE
TRACKING
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Gaze, thus looking at a specific object or person, plays a vital role in the coordination of interaction and movements in collectives.
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Gaze studies in computer vision usually are devoted to creating algorithms that can determine where a person in a scene is looking. While there have been many studies on humans, very few have focused on non-human animals
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This interdisciplinary project aims to address these challenges by collecting and analyzing a new dataset and developing a novel deep learning model to estimate the gaze position of non-human apes under natural interaction conditions.
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The proposed algorithm will assist researchers studying non-human apes’ perception during social or individual activities in enclosed or restricted areas.
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Interactional synchrony involves the continuous matching of the timing of actions, postures and behaviors over time.
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One possible explanation for the relative scarcity of synchrony studies in non-human primates is the absence of suitable technologies for quantifying such fast-pasted bodily movements. Manual coding of these subtle movements, along with their concurrent timing, is not only labor-intensive but also susceptible to coding errors.
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In this project, we are developing a method that employs state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to quantify action synchrony in nonhuman apes during natural social activities (analysis ongoing).