The studies of the evolution of language and culture are intertwined. Often, the same mechanisms – including the usual suspects such as imitation – are argued to be at the heart of the evolution of both. In addition, in the last decades, research on social learning in non-humans vs humans has largely focused on behavioral and cognitive processes, while research on non-human vs human communication has often opposed cognitive processes to emotional ones. These two approaches sometimes fall in the pitfall of looking for the one characteristic that makes us unique amongst other animals. In this talk, I want to focus on the commonalities between animal and human social learning, with the goal to braid together literature from social learning, affective development, and the evolution of communication. All three domains can be unified in an ABC model of social learning, which aims to provide a combined Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive approach to the acquisition of knowledge in a broad sense. Affect, for example through motivation or emotions, indeed colors our quest for knowledge and for knowledge transmission. I will rediscuss classic examples of the animal literature such as the vervet alarm call system or the acquisition of tool use in chimpanzees. The ABC framework also allows introducing continuity between so-called simple and complex cognitive processes, which makes it a more realistic pathway for their attribution to animals or non-verbal infants. As such it opens new avenues of research to resolve the debates on the evolution of communication and culture, particularly in our lineage.

Thibaud Gruber is a primatologist and a comparative psychologist whose has been working over 15 years on the topics of the evolution of culture and communication in great apes and humans. After a Master in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, he pursued a PhD in Psychology at the University of St Andrews, UK in 2011. He then obtained his Habilitation in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, in 2018. He has held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Zürich, Neuchâtel and Geneva, funded by the Fyssen Foundation, the Marie Curie initiative of the European Commission, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2020, thanks to an Eccellenza Fellowship from the SNSF, he has set up his own lab, the eccePAN lab (Ecology, Cognition, Communication, Emotion), at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, at the University of Geneva, with a joint position at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences.