Nature Beats: The What, How and Why of Rhythmic Animal Behaviours

Author Biography

Gabriela Alina Sauciuc is a cognitive scientist and senior researcher at Lund University. Her work examines the developmental and evolutionary foundations of social cognition, communication, and behaviouralcoordination, spanning studies with human infants, great apes, and other primates, on topics such as imitation, social learning, cooperation, imagination, and musicality. In recent years, she has focused much on integrative work regarding the biological, developmental, and ecological bases of rhythmic communication, including neuromuscular and environmental constraints, developmental trajectories of rhythmicity, and large scale comparative analyses across animal taxa. Her work aims to bridge comparative cognition, developmental science, and neuroethology to advance understanding of the evolutionary roots of rhythmic competence.    Adriano R. Lameira is Associate Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Warwick and a UK Research & Innovation Future Leaders Fellow. A primatologist and cognitive scientist, his research investigates the evolutionary origins of language, music and intelligence, with a particular focus on great ape vocal communication, cognition and combinatorics. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with wild orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo, complemented with captive work with all great ape genera across international accredited zoos, Lameira combines behavioural observation and innovative experimental design to test how the production and perception of consonant-like and vowel-like calls may have given rise to the first linguistic and musical structures in the human lineage. His work challenges long-standing assumptions that ape calls are purely reflexive, providing evidence for voluntary, structured vocal production and first vocal hierarchies identified outside language and music. Lameira advances a new synthesis linking biology, cognition and the future of intelligent systems.    Tomas Persson is Associate professor and senior lecturer in Cognitive Science at Lund University, Sweden, specializing in primate cognition and behaviour. 2007-2022 he co- directed the work at the Lund University Primate Research Station Furuvik. Besides researching rhythmic communication in chimpanzees, he has recently been involved in interdisciplinary projects on Scandinavian rock art and onmovement and cognition.