Human and Animal Rationality
Some philosophers deny that infants and animals can be said to be rational on the grounds that they appear to lack the ability to assess their reasons for belief and action, however cognitive psychologists and ethologists tend to describe infants and animals as rational agents in roughly the same sense as human adults.
The ARED project aims to explore the origins of human rational thought by comparing how minimally verbal children, dogs, and pigs form and revise their beliefs, specifically whether these non-linguistic populations have capacities for reflective belief revision. |
|
Social Learning & Cultural Evolution
With Christine Caldwell
My PhD research focused on investigating the development of socio-cognitive mechanisms that are thought to underpin distinctively human cumulative culture. Mechanisms such as explicitly metacognitive social learning strategies are proposed to be experience dependent and unique to humans. Therefore, investigating the age-related presence, absence, and/or emergence in young children provide insights into the cognitive demands involved and whether they are likely to be observed in nonhumans. I investigated this by conducting experimental studies with 3- to 8-year-old children in primary schools, nurseries, and public attractions across Scotland.
|
Prosocial Behaviour
With Emily Messer & Nicola McGuigan
I am interested how prosocial sharing behaviour develops during childhood, particularly how the characteristics and reputations of potential sharing recipients influence children's propensity to share. I have investigated whether the level of generosity shown by 3- to 8-year-old children varies according to whether the recipient had previously displayed kind and/or non-kind behaviour towards a third party, and whether knowledge of a recipients need and/or reputation influences how much they share.
|