Events at the MPIAB

Sleep is vital for health and fitness, and its expression is shaped by ecological and social contexts that may either promote or disturb it. Most research, however, has focused on captive settings, detached from natural environments that can modify the balance between benefits and drawbacks of sleeping in a group. Using direct recording of sleep using a custom-made, infrared remote camera, mounted on a telescopic pole s, we examined the impact of social rank and context on sleep in wild chimpanzees in Uganda. High-ranking males experienced shorter, more fragmented and less efficient sleep than subordinates. Party composition also influenced sleep: whereas sleeping in groups generally prolonged sleep duration and reduced wake-bout durations compared to sleeping alone, increasing the number of adult males in the sleeping party delayed nesting time and reduced sleep duration in high-ranking individuals. The presence of sexually active females delayed nesting time and advanced waking time in males, tended to reduce sleep duration and increased sleep fragmentation. These findings emphasize the need to study sleep in ecological contexts to gain a deeper understanding of the trade-offs shaped by social dynamics in sleep patterns. [more]

Understanding how animals acquire complex behaviors requires bridging ecological, cognitive, and social perspectives. In this seminar, I will first share findings from my research on wild gibbons, where I examined how immature individuals balance asocial and social learning, and selectively choose whom to learn from, particularly when facing ecological challenges such as foraging complexity. Building on these findings, I will introduce comparative and experimental work on how chimpanzees and humans balance individual and social information under different risks in exploration and decision making. Finally, I will present recent work developing agent-based models to simulate the spread of behavior in different cultural groups in humans and outline my plans to apply this approach to the evolution of learning strategies in soaring birds as part of the advertised project [in Elham Nourani's group]. This integrative perspective aims to reveal how animals adapt learning strategies to dynamic social and ecological environments across taxa. [more]