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