Episode 7 - Valerie Kuhlmeier

Valerie Kuhlmeier
is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, Canada.  She is the director of The Infant Cognition
Group, a laboratory studying cognitive development in the first few years of
life.




Val is happy about her book


Valerie grew up
outside of Los Angeles, CA, but moved south to the University of California,
San Diego, to pursue a BA and a BS in Anthropology and Biology,
respectively.  There, she worked with
Christine Johnson, a comparative cognitive psychologist who was studying
gaze-following behaviour in bonobos at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal
Park. 



Exhibiting great
dedication to the scientific endeavor, Valerie then left the sunny beaches of
San Diego for the snowy winters of Columbus, Ohio.  There, she worked under the supervision of
Sally Boysen at the Ohio State University Chimp Center, studying theory of mind
and the use of physical representations of space such as maps and scale
models.  She was a regular attendee of
the Tri-State Animal Learning Conference and became a founding member (founding
student member, that is…she’s not
THAT old) of the Comparative Cognition Society. 



She then spent
four years working as a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at Yale University
in New Haven, CT.  Her previous research
examining social-cognition in nonhuman primates formed a good foundation for
her work with mentors Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom on cognitive development in young
human primates, specifically infants.  
She also developed an undergraduate course on Comparative Cognition and
has been updating and improving it ever since.



In 2004, she
accepted a position at Queen’s University. 
Her research program focuses on cognition from a
developmental and evolutionary perspective. 
Specifically, she studies the development of social cognition, including
the recognition of others’ goals and needs (e.g., intention reading, theory of
mind), the imitative and empathetic responses to those goals and needs, and the
subsequent generation of prosocial behaviour. 
She also continues to teach courses on Comparative Cognition, using a
recently published textbook she coauthored with Mary (Cella) Olmsted. 

This one was a great deal of fun partly because we talked about big issues like theory of mind and where comparative cognition fits in the broader field of psychology.


Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.



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