Stefano is a lecturer in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Wolverhampton where he teaches classes on human evolution and animal behaviour. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2013 at the University of Kent, where he studied social behaviour among wild chimpanzees. Before joining the University of Wolverhampton in September 2018, he completed two post-docs in the US. During his first post-doc in 2014-2015 he studied the development of social cognition in infant rhesus macaques in Dr Stephen Suomi’s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, at the National Institutes of Health. In his second post-doc in 2016-2018 he studied human-macaque interactions as part of an NSF-funded project led by Dr Brenda McCowan from the University of California at Davis.

The focus of Stefano’s research program is the study of individual differences in the development, maintenance and adaptation of social behaviours among group-living animals, especially primates. He combines field observations with laboratory experiments in order to understand individual variation in the development of social skills and how individuals modify their social behaviours in relation to socio-demographic and environmental changes. To date, Stefano has published more than 20 papers in high-impact factor journals like Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, Psychoneuroendocrinology and Animal Behaviour.

  Project Overview

In humans, mothers engage in an intense face-to-face communication with their infants, characterized by mutual gazing, a variety of facial expressions and gentle touch. This face-to-face exchange of signals between mothers and infants is a large component of mother-infant interactions in humans and existing research has shown that this type of communication plays a key role for infant’s socio-cognitive development. Interestingly, to date, studies on chimpanzees and rhesus macaques have shown similar patterns of face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants in these two species, which suggests that this type of interactions between mothers and infants can be a common feature among primates. However, work on this topic in non-human primates, to date, has been limited to only these two species. Yet, a better understanding of the evolutionary origins and importance of face-to-face interactions in primates can be achieved by extending the investigation to a broader range of non-human primates. To this end, my project aims to study face-to-face interactions and infant development among long-tailed macaques living Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). The overall goals of this project are: (1) to understand the similarities and differences in the characteristics of mother-infant face-to-face interactions between this macaque species and those of other primate species, and (2) to investigate the impact of mother-infant face-to-face communication on infant social development. This project will provide a broader perspective on the importance of mother-infant face-to-face communication in primates, potentially shedding new light on the evolutionary origins of human sociality