Formaux, A., Sperber, D., Fagot, J., & Claidière, N. (2023) Guinea baboons are strategic cooperators. Science Advances, 9(43), eadi5282. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adi528   Humans are strategic cooperators; we make decisions on the basis of costs and benefits to maintain high levels of cooperation, and this is thought to have played a key role in human evolution. In […]

Formaux, A., O’Sullivan, E., Fagot, J., & Claidière, N. (2022). Understanding imitation in Papio papio: the role of experience and the presence of a conspecific demonstrator. Cognitive Science, 46(3), e13117   Abstract – What factors affect imitation performance? Varying theories of imitation stress the role of experience, but few studies have explicitly tested its role […]

Formaux, A., Fagot, J. & Claidière, N. (2021). “The experimental emergence of convention in a non-human primate”. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377: 20200310. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.03103   Abstract – Conventions form an essential part of human social and cultural behaviour and may also be important to other animal societies. Yet, despite the wealth of evidence that […]

Simon Kirby, Vanessa Ferdinand, Kenny Smith, Joël Fagot and Nicolas Claidière. Cumulative cultural evolution of systematic structure and grammatical complexity in humans and baboons.  Proceedings of the Evolang Conference, Bruxelles, 2020   This comparative paper shows a difference between humans and baboons in the way sets of structured behaviours culturally evolve.

Saldana, C., Smith, K., Kirby, S., Fagot, J. & Claidière, N. (2019) Cumulative cultural evolution in a non-copying task in children and Guinea baboons. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 10001-1007 Abstract – The unique cumulative nature of human culture has often been explained by high-fidelity copying mechanisms found only […]

Claidière, N., Kodjo-kuma Amedon, G., André J.P., Kirby, S., Smith, K., Sperber, D., Fagot, J. (2017) Convergent transformation and selection in cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.12.0073   Abstract – In biology, natural selection is the main explanation of adaptations and it is an attractive idea to think that an analogous force could […]

Claidière, N., Kirby, S., Smith, K. & Fagot, J. (2014). Cultural evolution of systematically structured behavior in a non-human primate. Proceeding of the Royal Academy of Science : B. December 2014 vol. 281 no. 1797 20141541   Abstract – Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A […]