Principal Investigator
Katja Liebal obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She was Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and is currently leading the group Human Biology and Primate Cognition at the University of Leipzig. Her main research interests include the communicative, emotional and social-cognitive abilities of non-human primates and human children from different cultural contexts, with a special focus on how developmental trajectories vary between and within humans and apes. For her research, she uses a cross-species, cross-cultural approach, combining observational and non-invasive experimental methods.
About
University of Leipzig
katja.liebal@uni-leipzig.de
Selected Publications
Amici, F., Lembeck, M., Holodynski, M., & Liebal, K. 2022. Face to face interactions in chimpanzee and human mother-infant-dyads. Philosophical Transactions B.
Amici, F., Oña, L., & Liebal, K. 2022. Compositionality in primate gestural communication and multicomponent signal displays. International Journal of Primatology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-022-00316-9.
Schirmer, A., Croy, I., Liebal, K., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2025). Non‐verbal effecting–animal research sheds light on human emotion communication. Biological Reviews, 100(1), 245-257. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13140
Liebal, K, Waller, BM, Burrows, AM, & Slocombe, KE. 2013. Primate communication: a multimodal approach. Cambridge University Press.
Oña, L. S., Sandler, W., & Liebal, K. (2019). A stepping stone to compositionality in chimpanzee communication. PeerJ, 7, e7623. doi:10.7717/peerj.7623