Natalie Awad Schwob
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awad-schwob.bsky.social
Natalie Awad Schwob
@awad-schwob.bsky.social
Asst. Prof in Psych & Animal Behavior at Bucknell
Research Scientist at Ape Initiative
Cognitive Evolution in Primates & Humans
🇺🇸🇱🇧🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈
https://bit.ly/pace-lab
Pinned
Cooperative and competitive social styles can yield similar theory of mind!
🐵🧠
Take a look at our paper on rhesus and Barbary macaques
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Proud of UMich grad student Rosa Muñoz for being awarded an @leakeyfoundation.org grant for her dissertation research on "The evolution and psychology of possession in macaques." Congrats Rosa, and all the new grantees!

leakeyfoundation.org/introducing-...
July 4, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
We have a new paper out in @cp-iscience.bsky.social reporting that more socially integrated female chimpanzees have lower offspring mortality 🧪 #evosky #primates #primatology #anthropology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Socially integrated female chimpanzees have lower offspring mortality
In humans and other social mammals, more socially connected females often have higher fitness. Yet evidence linking female sociality to offspring surv…
www.sciencedirect.com
July 1, 2025 at 11:35 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Check out the whole special issue of Philosophical Transactions B @royalsocietypublishing.org on ‘Selection shapes diverse animal minds’ chock-full of intriguing articles, and thanks to @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social‬ & @ellileadbeater.bsky.social‬ for organizing it!
June 26, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
We also applied a 'scaling ToM' approach from developmental science and found that - surprisingly - gaze following seemed to be the most 'difficult' task for monkeys to pass, and knowledge attribution the easiest (thanks to Henry Wellman for the suggestion!)
June 26, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
We found that rhesus and Barbary macaques are similarly successful at several metrics of social cognition, including gaze following, goal attribution & knowledge attribution, but rhesus are much bolder. This is despite major differences in their social behavior.
June 26, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Cooperative and competitive social styles can yield similar theory of mind!
🐵🧠
Take a look at our paper on rhesus and Barbary macaques
June 26, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
New review paper on primate facial expression! 🙈🙊🙉 with @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @jmicheletta.bsky.social and Olivia O’Callaghan @ntupsychology.bsky.social
Facial expression production and perception in non-human primates

Review by Bridget M. Waller, Olivia O’Callaghan, Jérôme Micheletta & Jamie Whitehouse

Web: go.nature.com/43NLtid
PDF: rdcu.be/erdXJ
June 16, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Check out our new paper on #drinking #tools in wild #chimpanzees! We looked at the contexts where the Kanyawara chimpanzees use tools to drink in a project started by Charlie MacKenzie as an undergraduate with senior author @zeppypearl.bsky.social, along with @kris-sabbi.bsky.social & many others!
Wild Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) Use Tools to Access Out of Reach Water
The use of tools to drink water is well-documented in wild chimpanzees, but the specific function of this behavior is unclear. Here we use a large data set of drinking behaviors spanning 14 years of ....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
April 24, 2025 at 12:35 AM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
New paper hot off the press! 🚨

Non adjacent dependency processing (or lack thereof) in bonobos.

A special one, as Kanzi, who participated in the study, passed away a few weeks ago 😢

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
April 23, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
🦍🖥️New paper on great apes in virtual environments: Chimpanzee Turning Behavior During Spatial Navigation in Virtual Environments (animalbehaviorandcognition.org/article.php?id=1390). Led by Sarah Koopman, we went back to basics and asked a simple question about object permanence and optical flow.
February 27, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Are humans the only species that communicates when a collaborator is missing information?

In @pnas.org, Luke Townrow and I show that our closest relatives, bonobos, can track when a partner is knowledgeable or ignorant, and tailor communication accordingly

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
February 3, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Xmas came early! 🎄
Very happy to share this review on combinatoriality in chimps and the evolution of language 🐵
Part of a great special issue, in a French, OA journal, that promotes multilingual science! French version to come in Jan!
@LaSFDP

journals.openedition.org/primatologie/1…
To what extent are call combinations in chimpanzees comparable to s...
1 Introduction The emergence of combinatoriality has been argued to represent one of the seven key evolutionary transitions in life (Maynard-Smith & Szathmary, 1995). Specifically, syntax – i.e., t...
journals.openedition.org
November 30, 2024 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Natalie Awad Schwob
Hot off the press! Is there a pre-linguistic basis for event role attribution? In our new paper out in PLoS Biology, we take a comparative eye tracking approach to explore temporal gaze distribution to agents and patients in dyadic interactions tinyurl.com/mryk7kmb
November 26, 2024 at 8:35 PM