My research focuses on the communicative, emotional and social-cognitive abilities of non-human primates and human children from different cultural contexts. I investigate how these skills develop in the first years of life and how the developmental trajectories vary between and within humans and apes.

I am the head of the human biology & primate cognition group and spokesperson of the "Leipzig Lab" at Leipzig University, where I also co-direct the project "Children and Nature" together with Daniel Haun (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology).