Simone Pika has spent over a decade studying the diversity of animals' communicative systems and underlying cognitive mechanisms in captive and natural settings with a special focus on primates and corvids. Recently, she extended this research avenue to include artifical intelligence, multi-modal communication, phenomena of convergent evolution and turn-taking.

Silvia La Gala started her PhD in 2019 in the Comparative BioCognition Group. She has several years of field experience with different taxa and studies the development of turn-taking skills and the impact of social factors in wild bonobos living in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, DRC.