Understanding Others

We investigate how humans and other great apes perceive, represent, and respond to other agents. This includes research on gaze following, agency perception, altercentric influences, and the development of theory of mind, including belief, desire, and aspectuality understanding. Across this area, developmental research traces how social understanding emerges and reorganizes across infancy and childhood, cross-cultural research examines its robustness across diverse social worlds, and comparative research situates it within an evolutionary framework. Together, this work identifies both shared foundations of social cognition and the specifically human forms of metarepresentational mindreading that emerge in development.