comparative psychology

Cultural evolution, or change in the socially learned behavior of a population over time, is a fascinating phenomenon that is widespread in humans and present in some non-human animals. In this dissertation, I present an array of cultural evolutionary studies that bridge pattern…

Despite having being discovered nearly 80 years ago, bonobos (Pan paniscus) are still one of the least well understood of the great apes, largely remaining in the shadow of their better known cousins, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). This is especially evident in the domain of…

Birds behave as if they quickly and accurately perceive an object-filled visual world. Besides pigeons, however, there is a large gap in our knowledge about the mechanisms of object recognition in avian visual systems. The pattern of shading reflected from object surfaces is one…

The study of primate intelligence, and specifically of general intelligence, has progressed rapidly in the last two decades, however several issues remain unexplored. While neuroanatomical volume measures (NVMs) such as brain size, neocortex size, and absolute or relative size o…