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Research Areas

The Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology investigates the origins, development, and diversity of cognition through an integrated developmental, cross-cultural, and comparative research program. Across humans and other great apes, the department examines how minds understand others, represent the physical world, develop self-related and metarepresentational capacities, cooperate in social groups, learn in culturally structured worlds, and emerge within specific socioecological environments.

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Understanding Others

How do minds perceive and interpret other agents? This area investigates the foundations of social understanding, from early sensitivities to gaze and agency to the development of theory of mind.

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Understanding Things

How do minds represent the non-social world? This area examines the cognitive foundations of physical reasoning, abstraction, and structured inference across development, cultures, and species.

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Understanding Self

What changes when minds begin to represent their own representations? This area explores self-related cognition through the department’s work on metarepresentation and the cognitive reorganization associated with the transition between three and five years of age.

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Cooperation

How do individuals coordinate action, negotiate shared interests, and sustain collective outcomes? This area investigates the cognitive and motivational foundations of cooperation in humans and other great apes.

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Cultural Learning

How do minds create the social and cultural worlds they inhabit? This area investigates how information is acquired from others, transmitted across generations, and stabilized within groups and populations.

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Developmental Socioecology

How do developmental environments shape cognition from the beginning of life onward? This area examines how early social experience, caregiving systems, and broader ecological and institutional contexts channel attention, learning, and cognitive development.

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