We all love to laugh! Laughter is present in all great ape species and plays an important social role in communication and group dynamics. We are currently exploring how orangutan laughter playbacks influence individuals’ affective bias toward positive rewards. This project is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

We’re exploring the origins of humor by studying playful teasing in apes, children, and other animals. Teasing provides a rich opportunity to study what teasers and targets understand about others’ intentions, reactions, and social bonds. This project is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Selected work:

Laumer, I. B., Winkler, S. L., Rossano, F., & Cartmill, E. A. (2024). Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 291(2016)

Eckert, J., Winkler, S. L., & Cartmill, E. A. (2020). Just kidding: the evolutionary roots of playful teasing. Biology letters, 16(9)

Gesture is a robust part of human language, and plays an even larger role in early childhood. But why do we gesture? Does it primarily help us communicate with others or organize our own thoughts? The gestures of other great apes are flexible, intentional, and often complex. Could human language have started first as gesture? Using a range of observational and experimental approaches, we study when and how people and other apes gesture and what impact it has on communication, thought, and learning.

Selected work:

Zhang, I., Izad, T., & Cartmill, E. A. (2024). Embodying Similarity and Difference: The Effect of Listing and Contrasting Gestures During US Political Speech.

Cartmill, E. A. (2023). Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication. ]

Cartmill, E. A., & Hobaiter, C. (2019). Developmental perspectives on primate gesture: 100 years in the making.

Cartmill, E. A., Rissman, L., Novack, M. A., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2017). The development of iconicity in children’s co-speech gesture and homesign.

Why are humans so good at using tools? Does our reasoning differ in meaningful ways from other tool-using species? We’re collaborating with Planckendael Zoo and Josh Tenebaum’s Computational Cognitive Science Group at MIT to investigate and model the cognitive mechanisms underlying tool use in non-human great apes using a virtual tool use game. This project is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Young children show a knack for problem solving and an understanding of probability. In this study, we want to understand how children make decision under uncertainty. Specifically, we want to investigate how children’s exploration is affected by their understandings of possibilities.

Our lab will be contributing to the Many Dogs 2 project investigating overimitation in Dogs. When learning a task, children will tend to unnecessarily copy irrelevant actions. Other great apes, however, don’t show this tendency to overimitate. In Many Dogs 2, our lab will be contributing to the emerging evidence that Dogs may also show this tendency to overimitate when their owners complete an irrelevant action.

In collaboration with Dr. Martin Zettersen, we investigate xxxxx