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Donal Cahill, Graduate Student in Psychology
email: doncahill@gmail.com
My research will aim to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the human moral faculty and their evolutionary origins. To that end I will work with dogs and non-human primates in order to explore the evolutionary analogues and homologues of such mechanisms, and potentially look to modelling to flesh out their adaptive rationale. I am also interested in investiating such issues from a neurological and developmental perspective, and hope thereby to be able to tie together ultimate and proximate level explanations.
Peter Blake, Harvard Graduate School of Education
email: blakepe@gse.harvard.edu
Humans possess concepts of property and ownership that are unique among animals. My research investigates both the ontongeny and evolutionary origins of these concepts. Using developmental models I assess what cues children use to recognize and respect claims on objects. I am currently developing comparative paradigms to determine the mechanisms underlying similar behaviors in non-human primates. My work draws on insights from both child development and evolutionary theory to generate new hypotheses and create a more integrated understanding of proprietary behavior.
Katie McAuliffe
(email): mcauliff@fas.harvard.edu
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.
 Adena Schachner (BA, Yale, 2006)
(email): amschach@fas.harvard.edu
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?
 Gaye Soley
(email): gsoley@fas.harvard.edu
I am interested in the cognitive processes underlying music perception. One line of my research explores musical enculturation, when it occurs, and what the social implications are. Through cross-cultural studies, I am investigating how infants, children and adults perceive the rhythm of different musical cultures, such as Western and Balkan music, and what role music plays in guiding early social preferences. Another line of my research explores the domain-specificity of music perception and by doing comparative research on music and speech processing, I hope to better understand the extent to which music processing is affected by general computational mechanisms.
 Brian Wood, Biological Anthropology
email: bmwood@fas.harvard.edu
Through my research, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the evolutionary processes that shaped human origins and continue to influence how we live today. Toward this goal, I am interested in testing hypotheses about the social and reproductive goals which guide economic decisions. My dissertation research focused on food production and food distribution among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania. Having previously worked with the Ache foragers of Paraguay, I feel that living and working with some of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies is an amazing privilege and opportunity to address exciting behavioral ecology problems within a socio-ecological setting that is most relevant to our species' history. Some of my other interests include the evolution and behavioral ecology of primates, spatial analysis, computer modeling, and ethnoarchaeology. I am advised by Frank Marlowe, Richard Wrangham, and Marc Hauser.
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Carolyn April, Student at the Harvard Medical School
email: carolyn.w.april@gmail.com
I am primarily interested in exploring what lessons moral philosophers in general and bioethicists in particular can draw from research in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. My recently completed doctoral research at the University of Oxford evaluated empirical work relating to the origin, function, and role of emotions in moral judgment and explored the relevance of these findings to normative bioethics. Having just begun my second year of medical school, I am interested in using scenario-based experiments to test which moral intuitions and emotions people rely upon in making moral judgments about controversial bioethical issues such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research.
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