CEL Alumni: Graduate Students

Justin Wood, PhD

Current affiliation: Asst. Professor, University of Southern California

I studied 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 studied 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 attempted 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.

Fiery Cushman, PhD

Email: cushman@wjh.harvard.edu

I studied cooperative and moral behavior in humans and nonhuman primates. I am interested in the adaptive history of moral behavior as well as the cognitive mechanisms that currently underly the 'moral sense' in humans and nonhuman primates. I employed an ethological approach to these questions in humans and non-humans alike. I am less interested in formal philosophy and lab-conditioned behaviors than in the natural use of moral intuitions in everyday social interaction. To learn about my research in humans and participate in an online study, please visit the Moral Sense Test website.

Rebecca Coughlin, Department of Psychology (BA, Princeton University, 1999)
email: coughlin@fas.harvard.edu

My interests are in the origins of human culture: where does human culture depart from biology and other animal cultures; how are human thought, behavior, and culture still biologically motivated; and how are we biological creatures that seem to have gone so far beyond the constraints of biology? To examine where human culture might depart from animal cultures, I am interested in comparisons of the developments of specific behaviors and cognitive abilities in humans and nonhumans. These comparisons may allow us to consider how and why such behaviors and abilities evolved in humans, and how they contribute to our capacity for culture. I am also interested in the similarities and differences between human and primate social behavior, and how they affect human behavior and culture. Currently, my attention is focused on elements of observational learning and innovation.

Felix Warneken
Visiting Graduate Student
email: warneken@eva.mpg.de

Current Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Website

My research focused on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of cooperation
and altruism. I investigated this by comparing the behavior of young children (1
to 2 years of age) with that of chimpanzees. Such comparisons enable us to
distinguish aspects of social behaviors which were already present in the
common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans from aspects which have evolved only in the human lineage. These studies were done as part of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (www.eva.mpg.de). I was a visiting researcher at the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, working on a version of the Moral Sense Test for children.

Ricardo Gil-da-Costa, PhD

Graduate Student

Current Affiliation: Research Associate at the Salk Institute

Email: ricardo@salk.edu

M. Keith Chen, PhD
Graduate Student
Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Economics, Yale University

Email: keith.chen@yale.edu

Website

Elisabetta Versace, PhD

Email: elisabettaversace@hotmail.com

Website

My main interest is the evolution of computational abilities in different species and the connection of these abilities to language. At the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard I was involved in experiments designed to assess these issues using spontaneous methods and conditioned learned procedures in both cotton-top tamarins and European starlings. At the Animal Cognition Laboratory, University of Trieste, I am investigating similar capabilities in newly-hatched chicks through imprinting procedures. I was also involved in research concerning welfare, memory and laterality in sheep.

Liane Young, PhD

(email): lyoung@mit.edu

Current Affiliation: Post-doc at MIT

Website

Having studied moral philosophy as an undergraduate, I then aimed to investigate the psychology of moral decision-making. I was interested in the cognitive mechanism underlying our moral judgments or moral intuitions. I hoped to uncover the parameters of moral scenarios relevant to our judgments by comparing a large sample of normal subjects tested via the Internet at http://moral.wjh.Harvard.edu to patient populations, including autistics, who lack an understanding of intentionality, and patients with frontal lobe damage, who exhibit deficits in emotional processing.