[SOC Seminar] The Evolution of Friendship in Great Apes
Speaker
Dr. Laura LewisLocation
Psych E-3834Info
Humans and our great ape cousins have remarkable cognitive capacities for forming and maintaining long-lasting social relationships. Our close social bonds, including friendships, are fundamental to our health, happiness, and survival – yet they require complex sociocognitive capacities like recognizing and remembering others, gathering social information, comprehending others’ emotions, and reconciliation. Despite the centrality of these skills to great apes friendships, we know relatively little about their evolutionary origins and developmental patterns. In this talk I will share about my Biological Origins of Mind (BOOM) Lab’s research program, which utilizes a comparative framework to explore the evolution and development of great ape social cognition. We utilize behavioral, eye tracking, thermal imaging, and motion-tracking methods to deepen our understanding of the cognitive capacities that humans and other apes use to form, maintain, and repair long-term friendships. Here I will present a body of research that investigates social attention, long-term memory, and emotion comprehension in chimpanzees and bonobos. Ultimately, the BOOM Lab tests hypotheses about the selective pressures that heightened great apes’ capacities to form and maintain long-lasting social relationships, and sheds light on the evolutionary pressures and developmental patterns that shape great apes’ complex forms of sociality.
