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.