Humans experience the world as a sequence of events – interactions between entities unfolding in time, space, and causality. We naturally structure these events around agents (who act) and patients (who are acted upon), a distinction deeply embedded in human language and thought. While some non-human animals communicate about predators or food, there is no evidence that they communicate about events ([agent] does [X] to [patient]). This gap could reflect limited expressive abilities or more fundamental differences in how animals perceive and remember events. One way to answer this question is to compare event cognition in humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, other great apes.

Recent studies show that both humans and apes: preferentially attend to agents during some interactions, choose agents over patients in decision tasks, and spontaneously encode the agent and patient roles. These findings suggest a shared agent-focused bias across hominids.

Our upcoming projects aim to expand this research by exploring how other elements of events are represented across species. This will help map the cognitive building blocks of event understanding and may explain why only humans communicate about complex event structures.

This project is part of the Syntax project of the NCCR Evolving Language.

Language does more than enable communication – it allows humans to build, share, and manipulate complex conceptual knowledge. Unlike animal communication, human language exhibits unmatched complexity, particularly in representing reality through hierarchical and compositional structures. This project will explore a key question: Does language shape how we structure knowledge, or did increasingly complex conceptual representations drive the evolution of language?

Non-human primates provide a unique window into this puzzle. They can use vocalizations to label aspects of their environment, such as food quality or predator type, combine calls to convey novel meanings, represent social structures in complex, nested ways and with training they can learn symbolic systems with training. Despite these abilities, it remains unclear whether their mental representations are compositional or hierarchically organised.

Our upcoming projects aim to investigate whether apes form compositional and hierarchical representations akin to those found in human language, while processing information – revealing whether the roots of human-like conceptual architecture extend deeper into our evolutionary past.

This project is part of the Meaning project of the NCCR Evolving Language.

This project is part of the global Many Primates consortium – a collaborative network of research facilities working together to advance comparative cognition through large-scale, cross-species studies.

Many Primates 3A focuses on a fundamental cognitive skill: inference by exclusion – the ability to deduce the correct answer by ruling out alternatives. While humans use this reasoning regularly, the evolutionary and ecological roots of this ability in other primates remain largely unknown. One major challenge in understanding exclusion inference has been the limited sample sizes and low species diversity in most studies.

By combining data from research groups around the world –  including ours –  this project will help identify which evolutionary pressures shape the development of inferential reasoning and whether this capacity is widespread or uniquely evolved in certain primate lineages.