Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture 
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Germany

phone: 0049 (0) 341 3550 251
e-mail: sonja_ebel@[>>> Please remove the brackets! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Research

I am interested in the role of experience in great ape and human tool use. Experience can have positive (i.e., facilitating) and negative effects on tool-use performance ("functional fixedness effect"). Related to this issue, it is still under debate whether great apes have enduring functional representations of tools, an intriguing research question. Finally, I am interested in differences in the structure of cognitive domains in different great ape species (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans).