Developmental Socioecology

We investigate how cognition emerges within concrete developmental environments. This includes work on mother–infant interaction, caregiving structures, mutual gaze, object-focused interaction, and the broader socioecology of early development across humans and other great apes. It also includes research on cultural variation in caregiving, baby-schema perception, and major contextual drivers of cognitive diversity, including language, schooling, and subsistence ecology. Across this area, developmental research traces how early interactional environments and broader developmental contexts shape cognitive and motivational trajectories, cross-cultural research examines variation in caregiving, ecology, and institutions across societies, and comparative research identifies which aspects of developmental environments are evolutionarily conserved and which are specifically human or culturally variable. This work provides a foundation for understanding how developmental contexts shape later cognition, motivation, and learning.