Kayla W. T. Kolff
Primatologist
ABOUT ME
From a young age I have always adored animals. Initially I wanted to become a vet, though that meant that I would occasionally be required to carry out surgeries and that made me squeamish. So that ambition ended for me but I still really wanted to work with animals. I then switched to studying animal behaviour during my bachelor and master studies, predominantly focusing on chimpanzee behaviour. After my master I had the opportunity to observe Western chimpanzees located in Taï National Forest in Cote d'Ivoire. Seeing them in their natural habitat made me realise even more that I wanted to continue observing them. I went on to complete a PhD, which allowed me to return to studying chimpanzees – this time focusing on their communicative interactions. My research was based on Eastern chimpanzees at the Ngogo field site in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher, my work is shifting toward understanding chimpanzee social behaviours in relation to health, prosociality and arousal.
Research Themes & Projects
Social Touch
Grooming in non-human primates and caressing in humans are thought to be evolutionarily linked through their similar stroking motions and shared affiliative functions, such as social bonding and stress reduction. This project explores the role of social touch in chimpanzees and its potential evolutionary connections to human caressing.
Communicative Repair
Communicative repair, "the fixing of a misunderstanding", is a frequent phenomenom in human communication. However, the outstanding question is whether building blocks of communicative repair are present in non-linguistic species? This project investigates this in chimpanzees during their grooming interactions
Turn-taking
Human language is underpinned by a universal infrastructure, cooperative turn-taking, which is suggested as an ancient mechanism that is claimed to exists across non-linguistic species. However, relatively little is known about turn-taking in non-linguistic species, where this project aims to bridge the gap by assessing turn-taking interactions in wild chimpanzees during their grooming interactions.
Medical Cognition
Medical behaviours are deeply rooted in human culture, with some involving the use of organic matter ranging from plant material to animal matter for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes. These behaviours can be done by oneself or one towards another. Thus this project aims at understanding the medicinal behaviours and their cognitive underpinnings in wild-living chimpanzees.
Publications
Kolff, K., Acosta Flórez, D., Mascaro, A., & Pika, S. (2025). Insect applications to open wounds by chimpanzees in the wild: first insights from East African chimpanzees. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 31242.
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Kolff, K., & Pika, S. (2025). Turn-taking in grooming interactions of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the wild: the role of demographic and social factors. Animal Cognition, 28(1), 26.
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Kolff, K., & Pika, S. (2022). The evolutionary roots of human communicative repair: the case of chimpanzee grooming. In The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Japan, eds A. Ravignani, R. Asano, D. Valente, F. Ferretti, S. Hartmann, M. Hayashi, et al.(Kanazawa).
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Webb, C. E., Kolff, K., Du. X., & de Waal, F B. (2020). Jealous Behavior in Chimpanzees Elicited by Social Intruders. Affective Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00019-5
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Goldsborough, Z., van Leeuwen, E J. C., Kolff, K. W. T., de Waal, F B. M., & Webb, C. E. (2019). Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) console a bereaved mother? Springer. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-019-00752-x