Stuart K Watson

The Biases in Captive Chimpanzee Cognitive Research: First Insights From the Ape Research Index (ARI) Database

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/...

📢 Our new paper is out in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social!

A step toward more comparable approaches in bioacoustics! We tested how different acoustic feature extraction and classification methods affect caller ID classification accuracy.

Read about it here: 🔗 shorturl.at/F31Pb

Join us!!! 2 (!) PhD positions on wild chimpanzees and bonobos in the Ape Behaviour & Ecology Group and Wildminds Lab!!! 🤩🤩🤩

Amazing sounding project and a real dream team of supervisors - share widely and/or apply!

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/
www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social

a lemur with orange eyes is standing in front of a tree with a blue sky in the background Alt: a lemur with orange eyes is standing in front of a tree with a blue sky in the background looking confused

The IPS EDEI committee has put together Conference tips for first timers with loads of great guidance on how to navigate your 1st conference. Available in English, en Français, & en Español Please share widely! Feedback welcome!

internationalprimatologicalsociety.org/ips-conferen...

🧪🐒 #IPS2025

It's out! 🎉
Together with @maelmleroux.bsky.social , @chimpsahoi.bsky.social, and S. Townsend, we wrote a chapter on methods for studying animal sequences.

Huge thanks to @limorraviv.bsky.social and @cedricboeckx.bsky.social for editing this amazing volume!

academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

An illustration of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant on their back while cracking nuts with a stone

Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)

Hot off the press 📣: one of the most surprising and unsettling findings of my PhD. A novel social tradition emerged in the tool-using white-faced capuchins of Jicarón island… abducting and carrying the infants of another species. Thread with gifs, videos, and all the bizarre details 👇

Feeding station and breeding monitoring assistant applications arE OPEN estimated closing date : 2025-06-08 The Sociable Weaver Project uses several automatic feeding stations to collect data on social network associations. These feeding stations …

🚨Field assistant job in South Africa working with sociable weavers 🚨

🔌Experienced in electronics?
🏷️Enjoy working with RFID technology?
🪶Like working with birds?

Find more information below!
Applications close on 08/06/2025

sociableweaverproject.com/recruitment/...

#fieldwork #ornithology

Interested in biology and comparative psychology, and working in an interdisciplinary project and research team? I’m advertising two PhD positions on the evolutionary origins of cooperative sociality and communication (start 1.10.) at the University of Konstanz👇 links below!

Do you teach cultural evolution? Then take a look at this opportunity to get money to release it open source for others to teach it, plus some additional funds for your research

The strain on scientific publishing Abstract. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; ...

Yep, that's because we are churning out more papers per scientist than ever -- evidence here, among other metrics about the publication market and it's unsustainable practices

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

I was sceptical this was real. It’s real.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

1/5 Chimpanzees take care of themselves and others.

Cases in which chimpanzees have treated their own and other people's wounds (from cleaning them to applying medicinal plants). They also clean themselves after having sex or relieving themselves.

(paper) www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

Wild gelada monkeys detect emotional and prosocial cues in vocal exchanges during aggression Recognizing vocal behaviours intended to benefit others is a crucial yet understudied social skill. Primates with rich vocal repertoires and complex societies are excellent models to track the evoluti...

It’s finally out!! Our new study shows that wild geladas seem to recognize prosocial vocal affiliation to victims of aggression! A key insight into the evolution of empathy in primates 🔊🐒 @geladasbridges.bsky.social @ethos-research.bsky.social
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Only two weeks left to apply!

Come and join me, Alban Lemasson, Katie Slocombe and Simon Townsend!

And spread the word to whoever might be interested!

@efp2024.bsky.social @lasfdp.bsky.social @ips-primatenews.bsky.social

Chimpanzee drumming shows rhythmicity and subspecies variation Chimpanzees drum on the buttress roots of trees for communication. Eleuteri et al. investigate the presence of key elements of musical rhythm and of regional variation in chimpanzee buttress drumming....

TLDR: new paper headed up by @vestaeleuteri.bsky.social
& with an awesome team, incl @andrearavignani.bsky.social , showing chimps have rhythm in their drumming & differences b/w east & west drum rhythms!

www.cell.com/current-biol...

But didn’t we know this already you ask? Well… 🧵1/16

Tune into this awesome new chimp drumming study!!! 🧵 🥁 Featuring the fabulous Nimba chimps!

We are hiring a chair/professor in our Ecology & Enviro Modelling group at @uniofstandrews.bsky.social. Scotland is lovely, and my colleagues are fantastic! Reach out if you are interested in joining the CREEM family ☺️

Working link this time 👇
www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Why did I never think of this!

To Bees or Not to Bees: Greater Honeyguides Sometimes Guide Humans to Animals Other Than Bees, but Likely Not as Punishment We show that greater honeyguides guide humans to nonbee destinations (snakes and a dead mammal); yet this is a rare occurrence, happening in only 3.7% of human-honeyguide interactions in 1 year and 0...

Absolute GOAT article title.

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

Postdoc job alert! I'm hiring a 3-yr postdoc to work on our Social Modifiers of Primate Lifespans grant. Job info and how to apply below. Deadline June 1. Pls share! jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

🔽🐂

Tldr; Researchers from UZH release LLMs into a sub-Reddit, pretending to be rape victims, trauma counsellors, bigots and PoC. These were even targeted to the personal data of the "subject". No consent from the 4m users of the subreddit was sought.

New paper hot off the press! 🚨

Non adjacent dependency processing (or lack thereof) in bonobos.

A special one, as Kanzi, who participated in the study, passed away a few weeks ago 😢

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Non-adjacent dependency processing (or lack thereof) in bonobos: an artificial grammar experiment | Royal Society Open Science A key feature of language is our capacity to process syntactic relationships between words, whether they are directly sequential (‘adjacent dependencies’) or separated by other words (‘non-adjacent de...

Big thanks to all the care staff, administrators, funders (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social, @snsf-ch.bsky.social, @agencerecherche.bsky.social), the Ape Conservation & Cognition Initiative and bonobos that made this study possible.

Here's that link again: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Regardless - the jury should remain out on bonobos capacity to process non-adjacent dependencies in acoustic sequences, and we highly encourage replication in other populations.

The use of e.g. thermography might be key in the future for probing this capacity in a more robust fashion.

a couple of elephants are standing next to each other in the snow and they are talking . ALT: a couple of elephants are standing next to each other in the snow and they are talking .

3) Perhaps Kanzi's demonstrable processing of NADs in English was scaffolded by the semantic layer of language. Our expt. used combinations of arbitrary sounds with no meaning - is it possible that without 'semantic anchors' the relations between these sounds become too challenging to process?