CEL Lab Personnel: Grad Students

? CEL Lab Personnel: Grad Students

	GRADUATE STUDENTS

Coren Apicella, Graduate Student in Biological Anthropology email: apicella@fas.harvard.edu Website My research focuses on human mating and parenting strategies. While completing my master’s degree in Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool, I examined how both paternity confidence and self-perceived mate value affects men’s investment in their children. For my PhD, I am studying mate choice and attractiveness and their relationship to health and reproductive success in the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population in Northern Tanzania. My advisors are Frank Marlowe, Marc Hauser and Richard Wrangham. 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. 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 fundamentally rooted than others? For example, if presented with various types of geometric cues in the same task, will human babies and non-human animals spontaneously encode and use some more adeptly than others? The first goal of my research is to explore whether we have evolved mechanisms designed to compute specific geometric properties of specific types of environmental stimuli, and to compare these sensitivities across various species in various tasks. Although we do see striking similarities between human infants and nonhuman animals, over the course of development humans come to look at the world in a geometric sense that transcends the limitations of our fundamental capacities. What enables humans to build abstract geometric concepts from the core cognitive building blocks that we share with other animals? What is the developmental timeline of this change, and what, if any, learning is required for it to occur? The second goal of my research is to look for the crucial cognitive differences across species and age-groups (e.g., in symbolic or linguistic capacities) that might explain the uniquely-human concepts of Euclidean geometry. 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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