Anthropological Institute & Museum

Research Interests

How and why individuals decide to go for and come up with novel solutions to problems they face is the central question of my PhD. Little is still known about the factors that directly influence individual level innovation despite this being central to the origin of population level traditions and cultures as well as contributing significantly to behavioural adaptation to changing conditions in many species. My focus is to elucidate the cognitive processes and ecological factors that determine who innovates when.

Cognitive processes such as inhibitory control, sustained attention and non-social cognitive ability form one aspect of the framework proposed to explain innovation. Further, ecological factors such as resource availability and predation pressure affect motivation and decision making and form a second aspect. Experience, sex, age and breeding status as modulating factors of the two aspects are also included. Currently I am working on testing the predictions of the framework using family groups of common marmosets kept in naturalistic captive conditions.

This primate group is particularly interesting because the cooperative breeding system is a close equivalent to that of humans and thus enables insight into how the evolution of culture may have been facilitated in our species. Close knit groups of co-dependent individuals potentially reduces the free-loader problem and reduces the genetic risk of innovation while maintaining or even increasing the potential benefits if social learning mechanisms are in place. Additionally this small-bodied and relatively small-brained primate faces problems and decisions common to thousands of other vertebrate species and thus will likely provide answers that are broadly applicable within behavioural biology.

Publications