Psychology
Profile
Background
After studying psychology in Germany and the United States, I was a PhD-student at the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. Afterwards I spent one year as a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. I joined the department as a lecturer in July 2007. (For more information see: http://www.comparative-psychology.de)
Teaching responsibilities
Currently, I teach Approaches to Psychology and Developmental Psychology. I supervise dissertations at both undergraduate and postgraduate level on cognition in human adults with different cultural backgrounds, human infants, and other great ape species.
Research Interests
I am interested on the impact of culture, on cognition and the psychological mechanisms that allow for human-specific forms of culture in the first place. For that I compare cognition in five species of great apes (orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees and humans) and diverse human cultures (across Europe and Africa).
Ongoing projects with external collaborators:
• Imitation in great apes (with Josep Call, MPI EVAN)
• Analogical cognition in great apes and children (with Josep Call, MPI EVAN)
• Mother infant interaction in great apes (with Josep Call, MPI EVAN)
• Cognitive similarities and differences between Dutch and ‡Akhoe Hai||om children
(with Stephen Levinson & Christan Rapold, MPI Psycholinguistics)
• Geometry of human spatial memory (with Dave Waller, Miami University)
• Neurocognition of human spatial memory (with Gabriele Janzen, MPI Psycholinguistics)
Indicative Publications
Haun, D. B. M., & Tomasello, M. (in press). Conformity to peer pressure in preschool children. Child Development.
Hribar, A., Haun, D. B. M., & Call, J. (2011 in press). Great apes’ strategies to map spatial relations. Animal Cognition.
Haun, D. B. M. (2011). Memory for body movements in Namibian hunter-gatherer children. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, 10, 56-62.
Haun, D. B. M., Rapold, C. J., Janzen, G., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). Plasticity of human spatial memory: Spatial language and cognition covary across cultures. Cognition, 119, 70-80.
Haun, D. B. M., Jordan, F., Vallortigara, G., & Clayton, N. S. (2010). Origins of spatial, temporal and numerical cognition: Insights from comparative psychology [Review article]. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 552-560.
Haun, D. B. M., & Call, J. (2009). Great apes’ capacities to recognize relational similarity. Cognition, 110, 147-159.
Haun, D. B. M., & Rapold, C. J. (2009). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology, 19(23), R1068-R1069.
Haun, D. B. M., & Call, J. (2008). Imitation recognition in great apes. Current Biology, 18(7), 288-290.
Haun, D.B.M., Rapold, C., Call, J., Janzen, G., Levinson, S.C. (2006). Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in Hominid spatial cognition. PNAS 103, 17568-17573.
Haun, D.B.M., Call, J., Janzen, G., Levinson, S.C. (2006). Evolutionary psychology of spatial representations in the Hominidae. Current Biology, 16, 1736-1740.
Allen, G.L., Kirasic, K.C., Rashotte, M.A., Haun, D.B.M. (2004). Aging and path integration skill: Kinesthetic and vestibular contributions to wayfinding. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(1), 170-179.
Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D.B.M., Levinson, S.C. (2004). Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(3), 108-114.
Waller, D., Loomis, J.M., Haun, D.B.M. (2004). Bodybased senses enhance knowledge of directions in largescale environments. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 157 - 163.
Waller, D., Haun, D.B.M. (2003). Scaling techniques for modeling directional knowledge. Behavior Research, Methods, Instruments and Computers, 35, 285 – 293.
Levinson, S.C., Kita, S., Haun, D.B.M., Rasch, B.H. (2002). Returning the tables: Language affects spatial reasoning. Cognition, 84(2), 155-188.