Education plays an important role in developing positive conservation behavior in future generations. We promote the use of subtle anthropomorphism within a children's storybook as an effective method of increasing ecological knowledge of a target primate species. We delivered an education programme to 170 children in Indonesia from wherein we…

The aim of this essay is to elucidate the relevance of cross-species comparisons for the investigation of human behavior and its development. The focus is on the comparison of human children and another group of primates, the non-human great apes, with special attention to their cognitive skills. Integrating a comparative and developmental…

Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity…

This research investigates the development of symbolic or representational play in two species of the genus "Pan", bonobos ("Pan paniscus") and chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"). The participants varied not only by species, but also as to whether they had become proficient in communicating with humans via a set of arbitrary visual symbols, called…

Common marmosets ("Callithrix jacchus jacchus"), human children, and human adults learned to find a goal that was located in the center of a square array of four identical landmarks. The location of the landmark array and corresponding goal varied across trials, so the task could not be solved without using the landmark array. In Experiment 1, a…

Based on observation of children in three cultures, the author concludes that the wild primate model is a fit vehicle for interpreting the play of human children. She then examines the effects and functions of play in order to build a species-specific human theory of play. The implications for education are indicated. (CT)

Work supported in part by four U.S. Public Health Service grants. (VM)

This article describes the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture (Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and its detailed application to the learning of algebraic symbol manipulation. The theory is applied to modeling the data from a study by Qin, Anderson, Silk, Stenger, & Carter (2004) in which children…

This book is written for children 5 through 10. Part of a series designed to develop their curiosity, fascinate them and educate them, this volume introduces the primate family, their physiology, and habits. Topics described include: (1) kinds of monkeys, including lemur, chimpanzee, gorilla, squirrel monkey, and marmoset; (2) behaviors when…

This paper reviews the literature concerned with the effect of various social systems (e.g., the family and the school) on the growth of social competence in the individual child and makes suggestions for further research. The discussion employs the contemporary view of socialization which emphasizes reciprocal causality (i.e., the reciprocal…