I am interested in understanding how our abilities to work together develop through childhood and how they evolved through evolutionary history. I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology where I studied how young children make decisions and communicate when they are working together. I then compared this to the abilities of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. After my PhD, I continued postdoctoral research in comparative psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Warwick and University of St Andrews before joining York St John in 2023.
I teach developmental, biological and comparative psychology as well as quantitative methods across the undergraduate degrees in psychology.
Cooperating with others plays such an important role in the lives of humans as well as many other species. My research aims to understand the cognitive and behavioural building blocks of cooperation using behavioural experiments with children and other primate species such as chimpanzees, bonobos and Japanese macaques. I present with puzzles that can be solved by working together and then compare the conditions that are most likely to lead to successful cooperation in different species. For example, what information do children communicate to cooperative partners to help to help them make their decisions? Can chimpanzees also use communication to reduce risks or do they reduce risk by avoiding cooperation altogether?
I am also part of the Many Primates coordination team, working on our second project MP2: Delay of Gratification. Many Primates is a large-scale collaboration bringing together primate researchers across the globe to answer questions and collect sample sizes that would not be possible by any single researcher. As a community, we also aim to promote fair and open science practices.
I am a series editor for Routledge Research in Comparative Psychology. I also provide adhoc reviews for a number of journals including Cognition, Plos Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society B and Social Cognition.
