Hauser’s Philosophy on Teaching and Students

Hauser Course Listings

Golden Rules for a Good Talk

 

One of the great joys of having students is watching them evolve into independent researchers, and ultimately, to turn around and teach me new things. I hope the old adage about not being able to teach an old horse new tricks never applies in my case.  My general outlook on students, from undergraduates to post-docs, is that they are first and foremost, colleagues. I treat students of all levels of knowledge with deep respect and want to hear their perspective.  It has often been the case in my lab and field work that some of the deepest insights have come from undergraduates who have yet to form solid opinions about particular theoretical positions, and thus challenge everything in their path.  I think this is the healthiest attitude to take.

My own role, then, is to provide all students with the richest possible environment for learning and discovering.  This means not only providing a well equipped lab and the resources to conduct field research, but a community for learning. Thus, the lab runs as a large cooperative, with everyone contributing different skills and talents to the overall goal of trying to understand human nature, its evolutionary history, adaptive design features, underlying neurophysiological mechanisms, and development.

Undergraduates 

I typically take on between 10-15 undergraduates per semester, including close to the same over the summer.  Most students work in the lab, although some also work in the field, especially over the summer (for more information on field research visit our Cayo Santiago website).  Undergraduates play a full role in the lab, participating in the design and implementation of experiments, building equipment, and analyzing data.  Undergraduates who spend a significant amount of time gradually build up to an independent project, often leading to a thesis.  On certain occasions, undergraduates in my lab have done such significant work, that their results have been published in some of the major journals in the field.  A sampling of such papers is listed below (undergraduates in orange).  Authorship depends on the nature of the contribution and I try to be up front about this from the beginning.

Hauser, M.D.  & Andersson, K. 1994. Left hemisphere dominance for processing vocalizations in adult, but not infant rhesus monkeys: Field experiments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91: 3946-3948
Hauser, M.D., Kralik, J., Botto, C., Garrett, M. and Oser, J. (1995). Self-recognition in primates: Phylogeny and the salience of species-typical traits. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 92: 10811-10814.
Hood, B.M., Hauser, M.D., Anderson, L. and Santos, L. (1999).  Gravity biases in a nonhuman primate? Developmental Science 2: 35-41.
Ramus, F., Hauser, M.D., Miller, C.T., Morris, D. & Mehler, J. (2000). Language discrimination by human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys.  Science 288: 349-351.
Ghazanfar, A.A., J.T. Flombaum, C.T. Miller, & M.D. Hauser. (2001). The units of perception in the antiphonal calling behavior of cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus): Playback experiments with long calls. Journal of Comparative Physiology, A. 187: 27-35.
Hauser, M.D., Williams, T., Kralik, J.D., & Moskovitz, D. (2001).  What guides a search for food that has disappeared? Experiments on cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus).  Journal of Comparative Psychology 115(2): 140-151.
Weiss, D., Garibaldi, B. & Hauser, M.D. (2001). The production and perception of long calls by cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus): Acoustic analyses and playback experiments.. Journal of Comparative Psychology 115: 258-271
DeIpolyi, A., Hauser, M.D. & Santos, L.R. (2001).  The role of landmarks in cotton-top tamarin spatial foraging: Evidence for geometric and non-geometric features. Animal Cognition 4:99-108.
Sulkowski, G & Hauser, M.D. (2001). Can rhesus monkeys spontaneously subtract? Cognition 79: 239-262.
Hauser, M.D., Williams, T., Kralik, J.D., & Moskovitz, D. (2001). What guides a search for food that has disappeared? Experiments on cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Journal of Comparative Psychology 115(2): 140-151.
Miller, C.T., Dibble, E., & Hauser, M.D. (2001). Amodal completion of acoustic signals in a nonhuman primate. Nature Neuroscience 4(8): 783-784.
Ghazanfar AA, Smith-Rohrberg D, Pollen A, and Hauser MD (2002) Temporal cues in the antiphonal calling behaviour of cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Animal Behaviour, 64: 427-438.
Tomb, I, Hauser, M.D., Caramazza, A., Deldin, P. (2002).  Do somatic markers mediate decisions on the gambling task?  Nature Neuroscience 5: 1103-1104.
Santos, L.R., Sulkowski, G., Spaepen, G.M. and Hauser, M.D. (2002). Object individuation using property/kind information in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Cognition 83: 241-264.
Hauser, M.D., Pearson, H. & Seelig, D. (2002). Ontogeny of tool use in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus): Innate recognition of functionally relevant features. Animal Behaviour, 64: 299-311.
Miller, C.T., Flusberg, S. & Hauser, M.D. (2003). Interruptibility of long call production in tamarins: implications for vocal control. Journal of Experimental Biology. 206: 2629-2639.
Hauser, M.D., Chen, K., Chen, F., and Chuang, E. (2003). Give unto others: genetically unrelated cotton-top tamarin monkeys preferentially give food to those who give food back. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B 270: 2363-2370.
Jordan, K., Weiss, D., Hauser, M.D., McMurray, B. (2004). Antiphonal responses to loud contact calls by cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). International Journal of Primatology 25: 465-475.
Miller, C.T., Iguina, C., & Hauser, M.D. (2005). Processing vocal signals for recognition during antiphonal calling: experiments with cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Animal Behaviour 69: 1387-1398.
Santos, L.R., Rosati, A., Sproul, C., Spaulding, B. & Hauser, M.D.(2005). Means-means-end tool choice in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus): finding the limits on primates' knowledge of tools. Animal Cognition 8: 236-246.
Spaulding, B. & Hauser, M.D. (2005). What experience is required for acquiring tool competence: Experiments with two callitrichids. Animal Behaviour 70: 517-526.
Stevens, J.R., Rosati, A., Ross, K. & Hauser, M.D. (2005). Will travel for food: spatial discounting in New World monkeys. Current Biology 15: 1865-1860.
Santos, L.R., Pearson, H., Spaepen, G., Tsao, F. & Hauser, M.D. (2005). Probing the limits of tool competence: Experiments with two non-tool using species (Cercopithecus aethiops and Saguinus oedipus). Animal Cognition.
Stevens, J.R., Hallinan, E.V., & Hauser, M.D. 2005. The ecology and evolution of patience in two New World primates. Biology Letters 1:223-226.
Hauser, M.D. & Spaulding, B. (2006). Wild rhesus monkeys generate causal inferences about possible and impossible physical transformations in the absence of experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 7181-7185.
Rosati, A.G., Stevens, J.R. & Hauser, M.D. (2006). The effect of handling time on temporal discounting in two New World primates. Animal Behaviour 71: 1379-1387.
Hauser, M.D., Cushman, F., Young, L., Jin, R.J. & Mikhail, J. (in press). A dissociation between moral judgments and justifications. Mind & Language.
Sproul, C., Palleroni, A. & Hauser, M.D.(in press). Cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) alarm calls contain sufficient information for recognition of individual identity. Animal Behaviour.

Graduates

Because my interests are very broad, I typically take on graduate students with equally broad interests. At any given time, I like to have graduate students working on the different pieces of my broad interests which include: the evolution of language, vocal communication in animals, conceptual abilities in animals and human infants, cooperation in animals, the nature of morality.  Graduate students typically begin by working on a project that builds off ongoing work in the lab and then gradually design their own project.  My role is not to dictate what project you pick, but to facilitate its success. This means not only giving you the resources necessary, but also giving you feedback on the feasibility and importance of the work.  Ultimately it is up to you. 

That said, I think there is a simple equation that defines the success of any graduate project vis a vis my mentorship: Your level of excitement about the project divided by my assessment of feasibility and importance. If this division is a positive number, we are in business.  If it is a huge number [meaning my input yields a low score], there are concerns!  Ultimately, I am keen to work with students who enjoy working hard, arguing with me, coming to me frequently to talk about new results or papers, and who want to develop an exciting research project.  In return, my goal is to not only guide the research program, but to also give you experience with reviewing papers, writing grants, giving first rate lectures, teaching, and advising.  In sum, the goal is to put you into position to get a great job or post-doc, and to become an independent researcher.

My graduate students have done very well over the years, and for those interested in applying, I would highly recommend contacting some of them to see what life is like in the lab.  The following represent some of the recent students and where they are; for a window into their productivity, see my publication list or their own web sites.

Michael Wilson, Post-doc, University of Minnesota, Department of Ecology and Evolution (www.discoverchimpanzees.org/researchers/mwilson_bio.php)
Claudia Uller, Asst. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Southern Louisiana (http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/psychology/CLIENTS/ClaudiaUller/ClaudiaUller.html)
Jerald Kralik, Post-doc, National Institute of Health (http://neuroscience.nih.gov/Lab.asp?Org_ID=192)
Daniel Weiss, Asst. Professor, Department of Psychology, Penn State (http://psych.la.psu.edu/faculty/weiss.html)
Laurie Santos, Asst. Professor, Department of Psychology, Yale University (www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Santos.html)
Cory Miller, Post-doc, Johns Hopkins University (www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ctmiller/)

What are graduate schools looking for in a statement of purpose?

I have been reading graduate school admissions essays for the past 12 years. These include essays from students applying to work with me as well as those from my own students who are preparing to apply to other graduate programs. When my own students apply to graduate school, I give them very specific advice about the nature of the essay, that is, what I think most candidate schools and advisors are looking for. I have always had a particular view about what makes for a good read (of course from a personal perspective). I have been struck by the fact that many of the incoming essays lack the kind of content that I am looking for; more often than not they instead have the appearance of an undergraduate application essay. This seems unfortunate because I often use the essay more than almost anything else to get a sense of the applicant’s intellectual potential and passion.

Many students that apply have stellar GPAs and GREs, but only a few present carefully constructed essays that really motivate their reasons for going to graduate school. In essence, essays that capture my attention are ones that develop ideas, propose experiments, point to holes in the literature, and do these things with passion and excitement. These very general comments, which will certainly not capture every advisor’s perspective, but they can be distilled to a few essential ingredients, presented below as questions:

• Why continue on with your education? Why do you need to learn more? What skills, theories, and knowledge do you lack?
• What are the kinds of discoveries and theories that sparked your interest in the chosen discipline?
• In graduate school, what kinds of questions do you hope to address? Why do you think that these questions are important? Given the set of questions that you will focus on, what kinds of methods do you hope to apply? What skills do you bring forward as you enter graduate school and which skills do you hope to acquire?
• What holes do you see in the current discipline [big picture stuff]? In what ways do you think that they can be addressed during your graduate career?
• What kind of graduate environment are you looking for? Are you particularly keen on working with one faculty advisor, and if so, why this particular person? If you are leaning more toward a cluster of advisors, as well as the department more generally, why?

Hint: faculty are engaged by students who have read some of their work, have thought critically about it, and wish to develop some of the issues addressed. Further, it helps with admissions to have one or more faculty championing your case.

Essays that have the above ingredients are truly informative. They tell each faculty member why the candidate wants to go to graduate school, what problems they hope to tackle, what skills they bring, and which skills they hope to acquire. Following this format is, of course, not a ticket for automatic admission, but it will certainly make your application more interesting and informative.

Post-doctoral fellows

Recent PhDs interested in post-docs should contact me with a letter of intent, laying out the kind of work they are interested in pursuing and why.  Post-docs are treated as full fledged colleagues, with an independent research program.  Typically, my post-docs have worked on projects intimately tied to ongoing research, though this is not always the case.  In some situations, a person might apply who wants to work on a problem that our lab hasn’t tackled, but is close to one of the core areas.  To give two recent examples, Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch spent five years with us working on problems of vocal production in animals, a topic that I had touched on briefly, but that Fitch pushed much further, working on a variety of species and applying novel techniques;  similarly, Dr. Joanna Bryson came to the lab to apply techniques in artificial intelligence to problems of primate learning.  Most post-docs in the lab have been funded by NRSA fellowships through the NIH.  At this point, no post-doc has ever been denied an NRSA, knock on wood!  As with my graduate students, all of the post-docs have also done extremely well in both landing jobs and moving on to other post-docs.  I list these below; again, to view their publications, see my own publication list or look at their web sites.

Jerald Kralik, Research Scientist, NIH (kralik@codon.nih.gov)
Asif Ghazanfar, Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tubingen, Germany (www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~asifg) and starting Fall 2004, Asst. Professor, Princeton University, Dept. Psychology
W. Tecumseh Fitch, Asst. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland (www.wjh.harvard.edu/~tec/)
Joanna Bryson, Lecturer, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK (www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/)

 

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