The main interest of my PhD research is the study of joint action behavior in primates in the context of the evolutionary origin of human cooperation. Social interactions often involve the coordination of behavior but the underlying socio-cognitive mechanisms may differ among species. Co-representation describes a phenomenon emerging during human joint action, when individuals mentally not only represent their own task and actions but also their partner’s.

I use the joint Simon task as an action coordination task to quantify co-representation and apply it to different nonhuman primate species (common marmosets, tonkean macaques and brown capuchins), as well as to human toddlers. With this comparative approach, I am investigating the emergence of co-representation from a phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspective

2022

Ballesta, S., Sadoughi, B., Miss, F., Whitehouse, J., Aguenounon, G. & Meunier, H. (2021). Assessing the reliability of an automated method for measuring
dominance hierarchy in non-human primates. Primates 62, 595–607. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-021-00909-7

Miss, F. M., Sadoughi, B., Meunier, H. & Burkart, J. M. (in press) Individual differences in coorepresentation in three monkey species in the joint Simon task: The role of social factors and inhibitory control. Animal Cognition, doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01622-8

Miss, F., Meunier, H., & Burkart, J. M. (2022). Primate origins of corepresentation and cooperative flexibility. Journal of Comparative Psychology, doi.org/10.1037/com0000315

2018

Miss, F. & Burkart, J. M. (2018). Co-representation during joint action in marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus). Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618772046

Burkart, J. M., Guerreiro Martins, E., Miss, F., & Zuercher, Y. (2018). From sharing food to sharing information: cooperative breeding and the roots of language. Interaction Studies, 19, 1-2.
Burkart et al 2018_interaction_studies (PDF, 604 KB)