Professor Alexandra Rosati will be giving a talk on "Evolving the Human Mind: What Our Primate Cousins Reveal about Human Cognition."

Why do humans exhibit flexible, intelligent behavior? Comparative studies of primates, our closest relatives, can help us understand the evolutionary origins of complex human cognition. I will present research examining how other primates like chimpanzees think about the world to address three main questions: how do other animals solve ecological problems like finding food, how do they solve social problems like finding friends, and how do their abilities change and develop over their lifetime? By integrating cognitive science with evolutionary theory, we can understand humans in the context of the natural world.