Admin Team

Erica Cartmill - Institute Director

I study the acquisition and evolution of language through work with great apes and human children. My work uses embodied behavior—gesture, action, and gaze—as ways of measuring communicative intent, social cognition, and the richness of the developmental environment. Gesture is an ideal medium for investigating what communicative structures and meanings can exist without language. I focus on two main areas of inquiry: gesture’s role in the origin of language, and the dynamic relationship between early social interactions and infant communicative development.

Jacob Foster - Institute Director

I am a computational sociologist interested in the evolutionary dynamics of ideas, the social production of collective intelligence, and the mutual constitution of culture and cognition. My empirical work blends computational methods with qualitative insights from science studies to probe the strategies, dispositions, and social processes that shape the production and persistence of scientific ideas. I use machine learning to mine the cultural meanings buried in text, and computational methods from macro-evolution to understand the dynamics of cultural populations. I also develops formal models of the structure and dynamics of ideas and institutions, with an emerging theoretical focus on the rich nexus of cognition, culture, and computation.

Stephanie Meredith - Institute Administrator

I study the acquisition of sex-typed behavior in nonhuman primates. My work focuses on the mechanistic similarities and dissimilarities of behavioral development in humans and nonhuman primates to better understand which elements of human gender are likely to have evolved and which are more likely to have been recently invented by humans.

Google Sites

Report abuse