Annual Conference of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association

Prof. Cat Hobaiter is a Professor at the University of St Andrews and principal investigator of the Wild Minds Lab based in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. Next to her position as Reader, she spends around half the year in the field, extending her 20 years of working with primates in Uganda and across Africa. She recently established new field sites in Uganda: the Bugoma Primate Conservation Project and in Guinea: the Moyen Bafing Chimpanzee Project. Hobaiter earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2011. Her research focuses on the evolution of communication and social behaviour, especially through long-term field studies of wild chimpanzees and other apes. During her PhD, she conducted the first systematic study of gestural communication in a wild ape, working in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda with the Sonso chimpanzee community. This research is extended across sites and species, not only covering apes, but also other species such as elephants. Like humans, apes do not gesture or vocalize in isolation – their communication combines calls, gestures, facial expressions, and body postures. To better understand their communication and cognition, she has integrated the study of all these separate modalities into the study of communication. Through this work, she not only hopes to advance the understanding of great ape communication but also, by looking at areas of overlap or species-specific traits, she hopes to gain an understanding of the evolutionary origins of language.