Psychology

Profile

Daniel currently works at the Max Planck Institute, Germany

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)

Recent Publications

More recent publications