BBS is now accepting commentary proposals on our target article "Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language." The deadline is May 5th. We are looking forward to hearing from colleagues of all disciplines and study systems, from humans to spiders.

Alignment during conversations is highly situation-dependent, study finds When people are talking, they can start to unconsciously mirror each other, for instance, in the words they use, their sentence structures and even hand gestures. This tendency to mirror others can le...

Just out: A nice write-up in Phys.org about our Proc B paper (includes a link to the paper itself OA):

phys.org/news/2026-04...

This project (with Stacy Rosenbaum and Nick Grebe) began in the dark days of Covid, and is finally ready to share. We've built a living database of primate paternity data (52 species, 3000 paternities) and completed first wave of analyses of paternity distribution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📣 Another BBS paper from the CSL Lab!
This paper w/alumni @dr-severinehex.bsky.social and @erin-isbilen.bsky.social + Daniel Rubenstein and @mh-christiansen.bsky.social argues that multimodality is key to safeguarding honesty in communication in humans and other animals

👉 doi.org/10.1017/S014...

I am delighted to share my new paper with coauthors @mh-christiansen.bsky.social, @erin-isbilen.bsky.social, and Dan Rubenstein. We argue that multimodality safeguards signal honesty by forming a multimodal gestalt that increases complexity and facilitates social costs on dishonesty.

I am delighted to share that I was elected to join as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. For the next three years I will be exploring the relationship between social and communicative complexity using the three zebra species. I look forward to sharing my results with you all.

Learning from eavesdropping on human-human encounters changes feeding location choice in horses (Equus Caballus) - Animal Cognition When animals observe human signals, they may learn from them. Such learning from humans has been reported for intentional communication between humans with animals, but animals might also learn social...

link.springer.com/article/10.1... A very neat study on social cognition in horses.

How does multimodal communication in non-human animals change under environmental stress? Our new paper with Severine Hex & Dan Rubenstein shows that communicative flexibility may facilitate survival, using plains zebras as a case study! 🦓 Read more below:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

“Age of risk” shapes simpler multimodal communication in the juvenile plains zebra (Equus quagga) - Communications Biology Network-based methods reveal the social forces shaping the multimodal communication of juvenile animals in complex societies. Juvenile plains zebras use simpler, less complex communication which may r...

Juvenile animals occupy a different social niche than adults, being inexperienced and facing different social risks. I investigated how this "age of risk" affects the development of communication in juvenile plains zebras. Check out the manuscript here: www.nature.com/articles/s42...