Blog

Apr 25

Field Time!

April brought on a wonderful field trip to the ongoing Meerkat Cognition Project at the Kalahari Research Centre in South Africa to catch up with the onsite team. Claire and Clementine are doing a great job of measuring the cognitive development of our meerkat pups.
Apr 25

New Publication: Novel Object / Food paradigms

The Novel Object/ Food paradigms represent a widespread method in behavioral ecology and animal cognition to assess personality traits like exploration, curiosity and boldness. In this new paper we validate these paradigms across individual and social situations as well as whether or not they stand the test of time. Find... read more →
Mar 07

The ARI projects aims

The Einstein Foundation, Berlin is supporting our research on experience effects on chimpanzee cognition. Have a look at the project aims in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efkB4nzaN-4
Jan 03

Joining the Editorial Board of Animal Behaviour

With the new year of 2025 I was honored to join the editorial board of the journal Animal Behaviour. As a member of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour I am very much looking forward to engaging more deeply with all the great work being produced through the... read more →
Dec 12

Update on the Urban Vervet Project 

At the end of 2024, we expressed our gratitude to our funder, the KONE Foundation Finland, by contributing a news story to their homepage. If you're curious about our progress in South Africa, where we study the urban-wildlife conflict between vervet monkeys and humans, we invite you to explore our... read more →
Jul 19

Busy Conference Summer 2024

The students of the Urban Vervet Project have had a productive Summer presenting our latest results on primate adaptations to anthropogenic environments at both the European Federation for Primatology’s conference in Lausanne in June 2024 and here at our home institution at the University of Zurich at the European Conference... read more →
Jul 02

Joining the DISI 2024 Faculty in St. Andrews

I had the great pleasure and honour to become one of the Faculty Members of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute 2024. For this I spent a solid week interacting with a global network of students and thinkers united in our interest in understanding intelligence in all it forms, cross systems.... read more →
Jun 03

New findings from the Urban Vervet Project

I am very proud of Lindsey Ellington, the UVP's first MSc student for publishing her study comparing object curiosity across three different habitats; captive, urban and wild. We find that monkeys in an anthropogenic environment are more similar to wild counterparts in their exploration tendencies than to captive peers. Read... read more →
Apr 23

Receiver of the 2024 Academic Excellence Award (UZH)

I am extremely honoured to have been awarded the Academic Excellence Award by the FAN (Fond für Akademische Nachwuchs) at the University of Zurich. With this generous financial support I will be able to grow my newly launched Urban Vervet Project and investigate many interesting questions on how primate behaviour... read more →
Feb 22