Dr. Severine Hex, PhD

I am delighted to share my new paper with coauthors @mh-christiansen.bsky.social, @erin-isbilen.bsky.social, and Dan Rubenstein. We argue that multimodality safeguards signal honesty by forming a multimodal gestalt that increases complexity and facilitates social costs on dishonesty.

I am delighted to share that I was elected to join as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. For the next three years I will be exploring the relationship between social and communicative complexity using the three zebra species. I look forward to sharing my results with you all.

Learning from eavesdropping on human-human encounters changes feeding location choice in horses (Equus Caballus) - Animal Cognition When animals observe human signals, they may learn from them. Such learning from humans has been reported for intentional communication between humans with animals, but animals might also learn social...

link.springer.com/article/10.1... A very neat study on social cognition in horses.

How does multimodal communication in non-human animals change under environmental stress? Our new paper with Severine Hex & Dan Rubenstein shows that communicative flexibility may facilitate survival, using plains zebras as a case study! 🦓 Read more below:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

“Age of risk” shapes simpler multimodal communication in the juvenile plains zebra (Equus quagga) - Communications Biology Network-based methods reveal the social forces shaping the multimodal communication of juvenile animals in complex societies. Juvenile plains zebras use simpler, less complex communication which may r...

Juvenile animals occupy a different social niche than adults, being inexperienced and facing different social risks. I investigated how this "age of risk" affects the development of communication in juvenile plains zebras. Check out the manuscript here: www.nature.com/articles/s42...