Programme Head: Sindhu Radhakrishna

The Animal Behaviour and Cognition Programme has, over the last nineteen years, specialised in investigating the biology of a wide range of nonhuman species, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, particularly primates and elephants, as well as different aspects of human-wildlife interactions and animal studies. Our research encompasses a variety of perspectives including ecology, behaviour, cognition, genetics, and conservation, which we explore through the use of a variety of observational, experimental, mathematical, computational and philosophical methods. The Programme currently consists of four research scholars, several short-term research associates and a number of collaborators from the Schools of Social Sciences and of Humanities in NIAS and from more than fifteen institutions across India, Japan, UK, USA and Australia. It is one of the few groups in the world working on the behavioural ecology and conservation of nocturnal primates in the wild, the only research group in the country working in the areas of social cognition, communication and culture in any animal species, including cognition, personality and decision-making in fish, and the only research team in India that has been monitoring a primate population and tracking the life-history strategies of more than 1,500 individually identified animals continuously over fifteen years, as well as credited with the discovery of a new primate species, the Arunachal macaque, over the last sixty years.