Fully funded PhD opportunity on self-awareness in nonhuman great apes at MPI-EVA, Leipzig

 

We are looking for a PhD Student (m/f/d) for a doctoral project in the field of psychology focusing on self-awareness in nonhuman great apes drawing from different methods such as touch screens experiments, playback experiments, eye tracking, and behavioural experiments. The successful applicant will be funded for three years (extension up to five years is possible), ideally starting in June 2025.

Your project

Humans have a strong, pervasive sense of self that includes our ability to recognize ourselves as individuals, feelings of agency, and different forms of introspection. What are the evolutionary origins of this self-awareness? Comparative psychologists have looked for hints of self-awareness in many nonhuman species and in many domains. Famously, whether nonhuman great apes can recognize themselves as individuals has led to the development of the so-called mirror mark test. Going beyond visual self-recognition, important questions remain to be answered. For example, can the behavior of nonhuman great apes provide evidence of a cross-modal self-concept that incorporates information from different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory)? And would evidence from different self-related tasks (visual, auditory, audio-visual) converge on the same answer? In this PhD project, we will seek answers to these questions.

Within this project, we will employ different experimental methods to investigate the ability of great apes (primarily chimpanzees, and potentially bonobos and / or humans) to recognize themselves. We will develop the experimental protocols together, drawing from a range of available methods, including audio playback of vocalizations, touch-screen based problem-solving tasks, and eye tracking to test whether great apes match video recordings of familiar conspecifics to audio recordings from the same individuals, including recordings of themselves.

Data collection will take place mainly at the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center at Leipzig Zoo, Germany. The research center has a history of more than 20 years of conducting non-invasive and voluntary studies of great ape behaviour and cognition, with great ape study participants who are experienced in participating in touch screen and eye tracking studies. Our approach will adhere to open science principles, including preregistered study designs supported by power analysis.

You will be hosted in the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, advised by Daniel Haun (Director), Christoph Völter (Senior Scientist) and Matthias Allritz (post-doctoral scientist).