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Coren Apicella, Graduate Student in Biological Anthropology
Peter Blake, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Sang Ah Lee Advisors: Elizabeth Spelke, Marc Hauser Spatial Cognition and Geometry (email): lee@wjh.harvard.edu How are spatial concepts organized in the mind? Are some concepts more Although we do see striking similarities between human infants and nonhuman animals, over the course of
I am interested in comparing the cognitive abilities of primates to those of species in other taxa. More specifically, I aim to understand the ecological pressures that may have driven the evolution of specific cognitive mechanisms in different mammalian species. Further, I intend to study whether these cognitive abilities are domain-specific or if they can be generalized across different contexts. For example, meerkats (Suricata suricatta) have been show to teach their offspring how to handle highly mobile prey items. However, it is unclear whether teaching in this species is constrained to the foraging domain or if meerkats also transmit other kinds of information through teaching. To address these questions I will study cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus), a cooperatively breeding primate and meerkats, a cooperatively breeding social carnivore. I hope that this work will place our understanding of animal cognitive evolution in a broader mammalian context.
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I am interested in the developmental and evolutionary origins of the human music capacity. My research is driven by the general questions of domain-specificity, innateness, and uniqueness of music-- Why is music a fundamental and universal part of human nature, and yet absent in other primate species? I aim to address these questions via research on early human development and via comparative research with non-human primates. Current questions of interest include: Why does music evoke emotional/physiological response, and to what extent do other animals experience similar responses to music? What is the role of infant-directed song and infant-directed speech in early development, and how does IDS mediate attention and learning? What computational mechanisms underlie music processing, and to what extent are these mechanisms also used for processing input from other domains, such as language?
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Justin Wood, Department of Psychology (BA, University of Virginia, 2002) (email): jwood@wjh.harvard.edu I study whether the foundational mechanisms of two human abilities, numerical cognition and morality, represent forms of uniquely human knowledge, or whether some of the core systems that subserve these domains are evolutionarily ancient, and thus shared with other animals. In order to address these questions, I study three different populations: human infants, semi-free ranging rhesus macaques, and captive cotton-top tamarins and marmosets. Regarding number, I am interested in the question of what constitutes an individual to human infants and primates (object, sounds, actions, etc.), and whether the same computations can be performed over all three of these entities. Regarding morality, I am interested in whether the basic mechanisms that support a full-fledged moral system, such as representing animate vs. inanimate entities and attributing goals and beliefs to others, are present in our evolutionary history. In all of these studies, I attempt to minimize the methodological differences in testing primates and human infants; in this way, it becomes possible to investigate which domains of knowledge are uniquely human, and which core systems are shared with other animals.
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Katie McAuliffe 
Adena Schachner (BA, Yale, 2006) 
Brian Wood, Biological Anthropology 