PRINCIPAL
INVESTIGATOR
Marc Hauser, PhD
Harvard College Professor
Professor of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology
and Biological Anthropology
Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of Education and Program in
Neurosciences
Co-Director, Mind, Brain and Behavior Program
Fellow, Center for Ethics
Director, Cognitive Evolution Lab
(see marc): A schedule
of appearances and lectures.
(email): mdh@wjh.harvard.edu
(websites): Personal Bio, Publications
(or just download my CV),
and photo albums here
and here.
Marc Hauser’s research focuses on the evolutionary
and developmental foundations of the human mind, with the specific
goal of understanding which mental capacities are shared with
other nonhuman primates and which are uniquely human.
Central questions include: What are the evolutionarily ancient
building blocks of our capacity for language, mathematics,
music and morality? What were the selective pressures that led
to a change in mental representation from the divergence
point with the last common primate ancestor? To what extent
is the architecture of the mind comprised of domain-specific reasoning
mechanisms? How do such mechanisms channel the organism’s
experiences in the world, allowing it to acquire a mature state
of knowledge?
A key aspect of this research is the use of
methods that tap spontaneously available conceptual representations,
and that can be used in a broad comparative context. By
using the same methods with human and nonhuman primates we are
more likely to uncover those capacities that are shared across
species and those that uniquely evolved in one species but not
another. Using such tools, Hauser and his students have
explored the extent to which domain-specific learning mechanisms
underpin our capacity for mathematics, the creation of tools and
other artifacts, navigation, and social relationships. Such
studies also help reveal whether language is necessary for the
acquisition of particular conceptual representations by showing
whether non-linguistic animals can acquire the same concepts as
humans. Hauser’s work further explores whether the
conceptual, perceptual, and computational systems underlying human
language evolved for language, or, as evidenced by their presence
in nonhuman primates, evolved for some other, non-linguistic function.
This work has led to collaborations with neuroscientists, linguists,
and developmental psychologists. The culmination of this
work is the radical proposition that all of the perceptual mechanisms
underlying human speech perception are based on general auditory
mechanisms, as opposed to systems that evolved uniquely for human
speech. In contrast, some of the core computational mechanisms
underlying language acquisition are noticeably absent in nonhuman
animals, with the most significant difference being the computational
machinery that underlies the hierarchical structure of language,
and in particular, the capacity for limitless recombination of
sound-meaning pairs to create an infinite variety of meaningful
expressions.
In addition to the above work, Hauser also
explores problems that are more squarely rooted in the traditions
of behavioral ecology and neuroethology. For example, over
the past few years, work on tamarins (and now marmosets) explores
the mechanisms underlying the capacity for social exchange and
reciprocal altruism. These studies make use of recent models
in game theory, together with theoretical and empirical developments
in the field of behavioral control, to better understand the cognitive
limits on cooperative interactions; these include constraints
from delayed gratification, inhibitory control, numerical quantification,
and assessments of reputation. In terms of neuroethological
studies, Hauser and his students conduct research on the vocal
communication of two captive new world monkeys (common marmosets,
cotton-top tamarins) and one semi-free-ranging old world monkey
(rhesus macaques) to better understand the meaning of their vocalizations,
the perceptual mechanisms underlying call classification, and
the neurophysiological substrates that enable vocal production
and perception.
