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 non-human great ape (and human) tool-use. Experience can potentially have positive (i.e., facilitating) and negative (i.e., fixating) effects on tool-use performance ("functional fixedness effect"). Related to this issue, it is a fascinating question if great apes have enduring functional representations of objects which is currently doubted by many authors. Finally, I am interested in the difference in the structure of cognitive domains in different great ape species (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans).