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Undergraduate Alumni | Graduate Alumni | RA Alumni | Post Doc and Other Alumni
Jenny Pegg (BA, Harvard College,
2004) - Lab RA & Manager (2004-2006)
I'm interested in the cognitive mechanisms of moral decision-making -- the intersection of conscious and unconscious cognitive realms and how these elements come together in forming our day-to-day judgments and actions. What cognitive components interact to comprise the moral faculty in a normal human adult? Do our moral judgments influence seemingly orthogonal processes, like attributions of cause and intent? How are moral judgments affected by physical neurological impairments or other differences (e.g., gender, age), and how are they affected by external factors? How do we overcome inhibitory mechanisms against harming another? Do we have moral blind spots, where heuristics that generally serve us well actually fail? I believe that neurobiological and developmental approaches to these questions will ultimately prove extremely fruitful.
I'm also fascinated by the relationship between scientific communities and the general population; particularly with regard to the ongoing debate and discussion surrounding the "is-ought" distinction.
Tyler Neill (Student, Harvard
'07) - Undergraduate Lab Assistant
(email): neill@fas.harvard.edu
When I resume school in Spring of 07, I'll be a first semester senior. I concentrate in Environmental Science and Public Policy (ESPP) and have yet to figure out whether spending 4,000 hours writing a (for me, optional) honors thesis seems up my alley, but if I do, it will likely be in the realm of resource management, which could touch on energy, agriculture, recycling, or perhaps information networks for redistributing goods. Who knows?
My interest in psychology is immature at best, but within it, I'd say I'm most interested in consciousness, religion, and morality. I'm here at the Hauser lab I guess mainly because of the novelty of monkeys, but am staying for the wonderful people in this lab.
I live in the Dudley Co-op and so love to cook, clean, and organize. I juggle some, bike some, volunteer at UNILU during the year, and read when I can, usually non-fiction. Also during this summer, I'm performing on guitar for nursing homes in the Boston area.
Ryan Boyko (BA, Harvard, 2005) - Lab RA
(email): boyko@fas.harvard.edu
My research focuses on statistical learning in tamarins and starlings. I'm exploring different ways to test the kinds of grammars these animals can and can't learn via visual and auditory discrimination experiments. In addition, I'm aiding research in the lab on morality and altruistic behavior.
My broader research interests are in the evolution of ape and hominid behavior and specifically on the effect of ecological and social pressures and constraints driving evolution in those lineages. I'm interested in game theoretic models of behaviors including altruistic cooperation and punishment and on simulation models of evolution in Pan.
Carolee Caffrey (PhD, UCLA) - Research Associate & Lab Manager (2006-2007)
I am a behavioral ecologist who has been studying the social organization, dispersal strategies, and details of cooperative nesting attempts of American Crows for almost 25 years. I come to the Cognitive Evolution Lab as Lab Manager and Research Associate, and bring my long-lived fascination with the minds of social vertebrates to the tasks ahead. I look forward to collaborating on incipient research on starling auditory pattern recognition capabilities.
David Glynn (BA, UVA, 2003) - Cayo RA
(email): ddglynn@yahoo.com
My research focuses on the mechanisms involved in numerical representations. Specifically, I explore the systems used in computations of small and large number quantities. I spend about half the year working with the semi-free ranging rhesus macaques on the island of Cayo Santiago, PR, and the other half working in the Cambridge laboratory.