People
Principal Investigators
Amanda is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience and aims to address the evolutionary origins of conceptual thought and causal knowledge by combining developmental and comparative studies of physical problem-solving.
Cat is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. She studies the evolution of communication and social behaviour in wild apes. Her work on gesture focuses on wild apes across Africa, and she is often based in Budongo, or at her new field-site in Bugoma, Uganda. You can find Cat’s list of publications here and the group GitHub here.
Juan is a Reader in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience who conducts research on the development of prelinguistic communication and early theories of mind in human infants and in great apes and monkeys.
Erin is a lecturer whose research interests focus on social learning, cross cultural influences and traditions. She studies the development of social learning capacities in children.
James is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience who studies episodic and spatial memory from both neuroscientific and developmental perspectives.
Malinda is a Professor in Developmental Psychology and studies infants’ and young children’s social behaviour and social-affiliative motivations.
Josep is a Professor in Evolutionary Origins of Mind who studies causal and inferential reasoning, tool-use, long-term memory and planning, gestural communication and mindreading in great apes and human children.
Manon is a lecturer in Origins of Mind and investigates why and how individuals decide to cooperate and help others in a competitive world. To this end, she conducts studies on children, non-human primates and rodents.
Laras is an Associate Lecturer. She studies how implicit and explicit elements come together in children’s skill learning, focusing on the processes behind learning from one’s own past performance and making predictions about others’ skills.
Eve is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience. Eve studies comparative and developmental psychology in human infants and non-human primates. She has interests in infant experience, social cognition and behaviour, and communication.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Dr Eva Reindl
Eva is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, working with Dr Seed on examining the origins and development of executive functions in young children. Other research interests include children’s problem-solving and tool use, innovation, collaboration, social and asocial learning.
Dr Eleanor Jordan
Eleanor studies the evolution and development of curiosity-driven learning. She uses a comparative approach to investigate the underlying cognitive and motivational mechanisms involved in self-directed exploration and learning in human children at the ABC lab and non-human primates at the Living Links Research Centre at Edinburgh zoo.
Postgraduate Students and Scholars
Matt Henderson
Matt is a graduate research student at the University of St Andrews. He previously studied the vocal communication of chimpanzees in Budongo, and his PhD will investigate gesture use in human children.
Rasmus Overmark
Rasmus is a PhD student doing a joint project in psychology and philosophy. The project looks at how language might contribute to the development of theory of mind, and particularly whether culture-specific constructions, like the use of certain quotatives, make a difference.
Jinzhi Feng
Jinzhi is a PhD student interested in the prosocial motivation of young children. Her PhD project investigates: 1. how children make reason-based moral judgments; 2. the association between having others in mind, prosocial behaviour, and potential biological underpinnings in young children.
Baby and Child Lab Manager
Geraldine began her research career as a Research Fellow at Strathclyde University. She subsequently retrained as a chartered teacher. Having taught in schools for over 13 years, she returned to academia as the manager of the ABC Lab. Her research interests span a wide spectrum of areas related to the cognitive and social development in early stage infants and children. Her role is to manage and coordinate the ABC’s developmental research and public engagement work.
Associates
Dr Emily Burdett, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK.
Dr Sarah Gerson – School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK.