The CBC offers an unprecedented approach onto the evolution and development of communicative and cognitive complexity by seeing communicative interactions and underlying cognitive mechanisms as an interplay between ecological, endocrinological, genetic and social factors and linking individual communicative differences to fitness.

We apply observational behavioral designs and non-invasive experimental and endocrinological methods to assess individual’s communicative, cognitive, hormonal, and social profiles. By combining these methods with advanced statistical modelling, and the use and development of cutting-edge tools (e.g., camera traps, movement tracking technology, pupillometry, mobile devices for the recording of eye movements), the discipline of Comparative Biocognition advances technologies used in cognitive science to gain conceptual insights into cognitive functions, and triggers of plastic processes.