11-Fakultät für Lebenswissenschaften

This module introduces students to the socio-cognitive foundations of culture and the cultural foundations of cognition, examined across species, development, and societies. Drawing on the research programme of the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), the course investigates how core cognitive capacities — including social attention, spatial reasoning, numerical cognition, communication, cooperation, abstraction, and metacognition — emerge through the interaction of evolutionary, developmental, ecological, and cultural processes.

Each week comprises a 60-minute lecture that establishes the theoretical landscape and presents key empirical findings, followed by a 30-minute seminar designed to develop the analytical and methodological skills appropriate to MSc-level engagement. Seminars are not demonstrations of cognitive tasks but structured intellectual exercises — critical analysis, evidence synthesis, methodological design, peer review, and structured debate — that directly prepare students for independent scholarly work and the module's written assessments.

By the end of the module, students will be equipped to: evaluate cross-cultural and cross-species empirical evidence critically; apply information-theoretic and evolutionary frameworks to questions about the origins of cognition; design comparative studies that meet contemporary methodological standards; and situate the scientific enterprise of CCP within broader questions about the nature and limits of human cognitive universals.