Josep Call is a Spanish comparative psychologist specializing in primate cognition.
Josep Call is a Spanish comparative psychologist specializing in primate cognition.
He was born in Catalonia, Spain and received a BA (1990) from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain), and a master's degree (1995) and PhD (1997) from Emory University (United States), under the supervision of Prof. Michael Tomasello.
From 1997 to 1999 he was a lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Liverpool (UK). Then in 1999 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany where he is currently a senior scientist, co-founder and co-director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Centre. Call also holds the post of Professor in Evolutionary Origins of Mind at the University of St Andrews, where his focus is on technical and social problem solving in animals with a special emphasis on the great apes. [1]
Among other topics, Call has worked to identify the unique cognitive and cultural processes that distinguish humans from their nearest primate relatives, the great apes. He has published two books and nearly two hundred research articles and book chapters on the cognition and behavior of apes and other animals. He is currently the editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology and a member of the editorial board of several other academic journals.
In 2013 Call was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, [2] and in March 2016 was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh [3] In July 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [4]
Primates is an order of mammals, which is further divided into the strepsirrhines, which include lemurs, galagos, and lorisids; and the haplorhines, which include tarsiers and simians. Primates arose 74–63 million years ago first from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted for life in tropical forests: many primate characteristics represent adaptations to the challenging environment among tree tops, including large brain sizes, binocular vision, color vision, vocalizations, shoulder girdles allowing a large degree of movement in the upper limbs, and opposable thumbs that enable better grasping and dexterity. Primates range in size from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, which weighs 30 g (1 oz), to the eastern gorilla, weighing over 200 kg (440 lb). There are 376–524 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the 2000s, 36 in the 2010s, and six in the 2020s.
The bonobo, also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus Pan. While bonobos are, today, recognized as a distinct species in their own right, they were initially thought to be a subspecies of Pan troglodytes, because of the physical similarities between the two species. Taxonomically, members of the chimpanzee/bonobo subtribe Panina—composed entirely by the genus Pan—are collectively termed panins.
Primatology is the scientific study of non-human primates. It is a diverse discipline at the boundary between mammalogy and anthropology, and researchers can be found in academic departments of anatomy, anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, veterinary sciences and zoology, as well as in animal sanctuaries, biomedical research facilities, museums and zoos. Primatologists study both living and extinct primates in their natural habitats and in laboratories by conducting field studies and experiments in order to understand aspects of their evolution and behavior.
Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal was a Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist. He was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory, and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Our Inner Ape (2005). His research centered on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a psychologist and primatologist most known for her work with two bonobos, Kanzi and Panbanisha, investigating their linguistic and cognitive abilities using lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. Originally based at Georgia State University's Language Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, she worked at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa from 2006 until her departure in November 2013.
Cognitive specialization suggests that certain behaviors, often in the domain of social communication, are passed on to offspring and refined to be maximally beneficial by the process of natural selection. Specializations serve an adaptive purpose for an organism by allowing the organism to be better suited for its habitat. Over time, specializations often become essential to the species' continued survival. Cognitive specialization in humans has been thought to underlie the acquisition, development, and evolution of language, theory of mind, and specific social skills such as trust and reciprocity. These specializations are considered to be critical to the survival of the species, even though there are successful individuals who lack certain specializations, including those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or who lack language abilities. Cognitive specialization is also believed to underlie adaptive behaviors such as self-awareness, navigation, and problem solving skills in several animal species such as chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins.
Frances J. White is a British biological anthropologist, professor, and primatologist at the University of Oregon. As a behavioral ecologist, her research focuses on the evolution of primate sociality and social systems. She has studied the socioecology of the bonobo chimpanzee for over 35 years at Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is the foremost American authority on this species in the wild and has done extensive field research on the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees. Her bonobo research examines why bonobos have evolved a very different social system compared to the closely related chimpanzee.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.
Primate cognition is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of non-human primates, particularly in the fields of psychology, behavioral biology, primatology, and anthropology.
The cooperative eye hypothesis is a proposed explanation for the appearance of the human eye. It suggests that the eye's distinctive visible characteristics evolved to make it easier for humans to follow another's gaze while communicating or while working together on tasks.
Culture and social cognition is the relationship between human culture and human cognitive capabilities. Cultural cognitive evolution proposes that humans’ unique cognitive capacities are not solely due to biological inheritance, but are in fact due in large part to cultural transmission and evolution. Modern humans and great apes are separated evolutionarily by about six million years. Proponents of cultural evolution argue that this would not have been enough time for humans to develop the advanced cognitive capabilities required to create tools, language, and build societies through biological evolution. Biological evolution could not have individually produced each of these cognitive capabilities within that period of time. Instead, humans must have evolved the capacity to learn through cultural transmission. This provides a more plausible explanation that would fit within the given time frame. Instead of having to biologically account for each cognitive mechanism that distinguishes modern humans from previous relatives, one would only have to account for one significant biological adaptation for cultural learning. According to this view, the ability to learn through cultural transmission is what distinguishes humans from other primates. Cultural learning allows humans to build on existing knowledge and make collective advancements, also known as the “ratchet effect”. The ratchet effect simply refers to the way in which humans continuously add on to existing knowledge through modifications and improvements. This unique ability distinguishes humans from related primates, who do not seem to build collaborative knowledge over time. Instead, primates seem to build individual knowledge, in which the expertise of one animal is not built on by others, and does not progress across time.
Deep social mind is a concept in evolutionary psychology; it refers to the distinctively human capacity to 'read' the mental states of others while reciprocally enabling those others to read one's own mental states at the same time. The term 'deep social mind' was first coined in 1999 by Andrew Whiten, professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at St. Andrews University, Scotland. Together with closely related terms such as 'reflexivity' and 'intersubjectivity', it is now well-established among scholars investigating the evolutionary emergence of human sociality, cognition and communication.
David Andrew Whiten, known as Andrew Whiten is a British zoologist and psychologist, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, and Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is known for his research in social cognition, specifically on social learning, tradition and the evolution of culture, social Machiavellian intelligence, autism and imitation, as well as the behavioral ecology of sociality. In 1996, Whiten and his colleagues invented an artificial fruit that allowed to study learning in apes and humans.
Theory of mind in animals is an extension to non-human animals of the philosophical and psychological concept of theory of mind (ToM), sometimes known as mentalisation or mind-reading. It involves an inquiry into whether non-human animals have the ability to attribute mental states to themselves and others, including recognition that others have mental states that are different from their own. To investigate this issue experimentally, researchers place non-human animals in situations where their resulting behavior can be interpreted as supporting ToM or not.
Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates, and species whose cognition converged with our own. He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D, FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications, prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem; her work includes research between ape and human social cognition, and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.
Primate archaeology is a field of research established in 2008 that combines research interests and foci from primatology and archaeology. The main aim of primate archaeology is to study behavior of extant and extinct primates and the associated material records. The discipline attempts to move beyond archaeology's anthropocentric perspective by placing the focus on both past and present primate tool use.
Simone Susanne Pika is a German ethologist and primatologist investigating the evolution and development of language, cognition and plasticity by focusing on distinct model systems such as corvids, great apes, monkeys and dolphins. Since 2017, she co-directs the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project, Loango National Park in Gabon. She is a full professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Germany.
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