Staff Profile
Dr Shona Duguid
Lecturer
I am interested in understanding how our abilities to work together develop through childhood and how the 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.
- School – School of Education, Language and Psychology
- Email – s.duguid@yorksj.ac.uk
Teaching
I teach developmental, biological and comparative psychology as well as quantitative methods across the undergraduate degrees in psychology.
Research
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.
Professional Activities
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.
Publications
Journal Articles
Many Primates et al. (2022) The evolution of short-term memory. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 9(4), 428-516. https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.09.04.06.202
Eckert, J., Rakoczy, H., Duguid, S., Herrmann, E., & Call, J. (2021).The Ape Lottery: Chimpanzees Fail to Consider Spatial Information When Drawing Statistical Inferences. Animal Behavior & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.08.03.01.2021
Duguid, S., Grueneisen, S., Wyman, E., Tomasello, M. (2020). The Strategies Used by Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and Children (Homo sapiens) to Solve a Simple Coordination Problem. Journal of Comparative Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000220
Duguid, S., Melis, AP. (2020) How animals collaborate: Underlying proximate mechanisms. WIREs Cogn Sci. . https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1529
Sánchez-Amaro, A., Duguid, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2020). Do 7-year-old children understand social leverage? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 199, 104963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104963
Many Primates, Altschul DM, Beran MJ, Bohn M, Call J, DeTroy S, et al. (2019) Establishing an infrastructure for collaboration in primate cognition research. PLoS ONE 14(10): e0223675. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223675
John M., Duguid, S., Tomasello M, Melis AP (2019) How chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) share the spoils with collaborators and bystanders. PLOS ONE 14(9): e0222795. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222795
Sánchez -Amaro, A., Duguid, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2018). Chimpanzees’ leverage understanding. Plos ONE, 13(12): e0207868. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207868
Sánchez -Amaro, A., Duguid, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2018). Chimpanzees and children avoid mutual defection in a social dilemma. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(1), 46-54. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.07.004
Grueneisen, S.*, Duguid, S.*, & Tomasello, M. (2017). Do children and great apes adjust the visibility of their actions for cooperative and competitive partners? Scientific Reports, 7(1), 8504. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08435-7
*Co-first authorship
Schmelz, M., Duguid, S†., Bohn, M., & Voelter, C. (2017). Cooperative problem solving in giant otters (Pteronura brasiliensis) and Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus). Animal Cognition, 1-8. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-017-1126-2
†Corresponding author
Sánchez-Amaro, A., Duguid, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Chimpanzees, bonobos and children successfully coordinate in conflict situations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1856), 20170259. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0259
Sánchez-Amaro, A., Duguid, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Chimpanzees coordinate in a snowdrift game. Animal Behaviour, 116, 61-74. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.03.030
Duguid, S., Wyman, E., Bullinger, A. F., Herfurth-Majstorovic, K., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Coordination strategies of chimpanzees and human children in a Stag Hunt game. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1796), 20141973. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.1973
Book Chapters
Duguid, S. (2016). Primate Cooperation. In V. Weekes-Shackelford, T. K. Shackelford, & V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science (pp. 1-4). Springer International Publishing.
Duguid, S., Allritz, M., de las Heras, A., Nolte, S. & Call, J. (2020). Cooperation and communication in great apes. In Hopper., L. & Ross., S. (Ed.) Chimpanzees in Context. University of Chicago Press
