Speaker
Description
Marmosets are highly social monkeys that engage in cooperative breeding. This systematic reliance on allomaternal care entails a set of behavioral affordances that are unique or particularly pronounced in comparison to other primates. I will provide an overview of mechanisms that support these intense social interactions, with a particular focus on behavioral coordination, turn-taking and cooperative signaling. From an ontogenetic perspective, I will examine the contingencies between the emergence of behavioral affordances associated with cooperative breeding and neurodevelopmental trajectories, emphasizing how these rich social inputs may tune the brain toward its prosocial adult phenotype. Given that humans also systematically rely on allomaternal care, these findings carry important implications for the evolution of human social cognition.
