I am a cognitive and behavioral scientist studying how social relationships, experience, and environments shape thinking and behavior. My research primarily focuses on primates and I use observational, experimental, and computational methods.
Currently, I am a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, where I work in the Comparative Cognition Laboratory of Dr. Federico Rossano.
My research asks how social relationships, experience, and environments shape learning, decision-making, and cooperation. I study primate behavior and cognition from a comparative perspective to better understand the evolution of human thinking.
I work primarily with sanctuary-living primates (including macaques, gibbons, orangutans, and chimpanzees) in semi-naturalistic environments, using non-invasive research methods. I also study coordination in human–dog teams and how built environments shape human cognition and behavior.
Some of my research questions include:
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I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, where I studied how primates cooperate and compete over resources. Across four empirical projects, I found that their strategies vary with social relationships, environmental conditions, and the interaction between them.
I previously earned a BSc and MSc in Psychology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and interned and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. During my PhD, I also completed the Specialization in Anthropogeny at the Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA).
You can find a current list of my peer-reviewed publications on my Google Scholar page.
Kaufhold, S.P., Goguen, A., Viano, K., & Rossano, F. (2026). Early-life experience and disease exposure affect pathogen avoidance behaviour in macaques. Royal Society Open Science, 13, 26011. [LINK]
Kaufhold, S.P., Terwilliger, J., Kefer, S., & Rossano, F. (2026). The search process of professional detection dog teams in realistic environments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.07129. [LINK]
Ma, X.*, Lin, Y.*, Xu, Y., Kaufhold, S.P., Terwilliger, J., Meza, A., Zhu, Y., Rossano, F., & Wang, Y., (2026). AlphaChimp: Tracking and Behavior Recognition in Chimpanzees. International Journal of Computer Vision 134(6), 285. [PDF]
Kaufhold, S.P.*, Borzello, M.*, Rossano, F., & Kirsh, D. (2026). Beyond the Lab: Cognitive Neuroscience in Real-World Contexts. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 17(2), e70027. [PDF]
Chang, T.A.*, Arnett, C.*, ... Kaufhold, S.P., ... (2025). Global PIQA: Evaluating Physical Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.24081. [LINK]
Terwilliger, J.*, Kaufhold, S.P.*, & Rossano, F. (2025). A Functionalist Framework for Machine Learning in Animal Communication. Proceedings of the AI for Animal Communication Workshop at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). [PDF]
Kaufhold, S.P.*, Terwilliger, J.*, & Rossano, F. (2025). Socially situated navigation: Social rank and sex influence spatial navigation strategies in Japanese macaques. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Kaufhold, S. P. (2025). The socioecology of resource conflict in primates [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego]. eScholarship. [PDF]
Kaufhold, S. P., Sánchez-Amaro, A., Tan, J., Fernández-Navarro, S., Atencia, R., & Rossano, F. (2024). Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) strategically manipulate their environment to deny conspecifics access to food. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 17579. [PDF]
Ma, X.*, Kaufhold, S. P.*, Su, J.*, Zhu, W., Terwilliger, J., Meza, A., Zhu, Y., Rossano, F. & Wang, Y. (2023). ChimpACT: A Longitudinal Dataset for Understanding Chimpanzee Behaviors. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37(9). [PDF]
van Leeuwen, E. J. C., DeTroy, S. E., Kaufhold, S. P., Dubois, C., Schütte, S., Call, J., & Haun, D. B. M. (2021). Chimpanzees behave prosocially in a group-specific manner. Science Advances, 7(9), eabc7982. [PDF]
Sánchez-Amaro, A., Tan, J., Kaufhold, S. P., & Rossano, F. (2021). How environmental unpredictability and harshness affect chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in risk-choice and temporal discounting tasks. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 135(2), 232. [LINK]
Rossano, F.*, Kaufhold, S. P.*, (2021). Animal Communication Overview. In Call, J., Kaufman A. & Kaufman J. (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Animal Cognition. Cambridge University Press. [LINK]
Kaufhold, S. P., & Rossano, F. (2020). Proximate mechanisms and relational history: the interdependence of food transfers in socially housed orang-utans (Pongo abelii). Animal Behaviour, 167, 243-253. [LINK]
Sánchez-Amaro, A., Tan, J., Kaufhold, S. P., & Rossano, F. (2020). Gibbons exploit information about what a competitor can see. Animal Cognition, 23(2), 289-299. [PDF]
Kaufhold, S. P.*, & van Leeuwen, E. J. C.* (2019). Why intergroup variation matters for understanding behaviour. Biology Letters, 15(11), 20190695. [PDF]
* indicates shared first authorship.
Please reach out for any questions about my research, potential collaborations, job offers, or media inquiries. I am also happy to connect with students seeking advice on academic careers or exploring internship opportunities. You can contact me via email at: spkaufho@ucsd.edu
