Valerie A Kuhlmeier

• PhD
• Professor at Queen's University

Introduction: Given dogs’ unique roles in human society, there is the potential for relatively direct, practical applications of comparative cognition research. Yet, there is a persistent disconnect between scholarly research and practical K9 training. The present study used a public scholarship framework to develop a detailed 32-item survey intend...

Although dogs have a special place in human history as the first domesticated species and play important roles in many cultures around the world, their role in scientific studies has been relatively recent. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Darwin, Pavlov, Scott & Fuller), domestic dogs were not commonly the subject of rigorous scientific invest...

For this special issue in honor of Dr. Sarah (Sally) Boysen’s career, we review studies on point following in nonhuman animals. Of the 125 papers that we documented on this topic published since the publication of Povinelli, Nelson, and Boysen (1990), 93 (74%) were published in the past fifteen years, including 21 in the past five years, indicating...

This paper provides a review of current research on academic integrity in higher education, with a focus on its application to assessment practices in online courses. Understanding the types and causes of academic dishonesty can inform the suite of methods that might be used to most effectively promote academic integrity. Thus, the paper first addr...

Engaging in prosocial behavior is costly. By selectively directing prosocial behavior toward individuals with a high probability of reciprocating, we are able to offset these potential costs and maintain a sustainable prosocial system. Often, we determine whether an individual will make a good prosocial partner through the observation of their soci...

L’étude scientifique de la cognition animale prend racine tant dans la psychologie expérimentale que dans la biologie évolutive, si bien que les recherches s’effectuent souvent dans des disciplines connexes, comme les neurosciences, l’informatique ou l’écologie. La nature interdisciplinaire de cette entreprise constitue à la fois une richesse et un...

Dogs have been working with humans for thousands of years. Nowadays, we have very important jobs for dogs, like helping blind people to walk safely in a city or helping a police officer to find something dangerous. But how do dogs learn to do their jobs? In this article, you will learn about animal learning. Specifically, we will focus on how polic...

The scientific study of animal cognition has roots in both experimental psychology and evolutionary biology, with researchers often working in related disciplines such as neuroscience, computing science, or ecology. The interdisciplinary nature of the endeavour is both a strength and a challenge for the field. We begin this review with a brief hist...

This paper provides a review of research on online education, with a focus on the methods used to promote academic integrity. Broader issues about how and why academic dishonesty occurs, and the mixed findings in relation to whether or not academic dishonesty may be more or less prevalent in online classes are discussed. Understanding the varied na...

Individuals with trait social anxiety are disposed to be wary of others. Although feeling social anxiety is unpleasant, evolutionary psychologists consider it to be an adaptation. In current models, social anxiety is described as functioning to have helped our prehistoric ancestors avoid social threat by warning individuals when their interactions...

Individuals with trait social anxiety are disposed to be wary of others. Although feeling social anxiety is unpleasant, evolutionary psychologists consider it to be an adaptation. In current models, social anxiety is described as functioning to have helped our prehistoric ancestors avoid social threat by warning individuals when their interactions...

That very young infants attribute goals to the object-directed reaches of others is well characterized, but we understand little of what infants encode about the objects being acted on. The present study examined whether the context surrounding the reach, specifically the presence of another object, prompts infants to encode feature information of...

This exploratory study examined the role of social-cognitive development in the production of moral behavior. Specifically, we explored the propensity of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to engage in helping, sharing, and comforting acts, addressing two specific questions: (1) Compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, how do y...

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is “the thought that counts.” However, research with slightly older children in the presc...

When young children recruit others to help a person in need, media reports often treat it as a remarkable event. Yet it is unclear how commonly children perform this type of pro-social behavior and what forms of social understanding, cognitive abilities, and motivational factors promote or discourage it. In this study, 48 three- to four-year-old ch...

When young children recruit others to help a person in need, media reports often treat it as a remarkable event. Yet it is unclear how commonly children perform this type of prosocial behavior and what forms of social understanding, cognitive abilities, and motivational factors promote or discourage it. In this study, 48 3- to 4-year-old children c...

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of Make the Connection (MTC), an attachment focused parent training program, in fostering positive maternal attitudes thought to underlie sensitive responding. Background: Effective early intervention programs for ‘at risk’ parents are likely to promote healthy development and mitigate various negative outcome...

Objective: Assess the effectiveness of Make the Connection (MTC), an attachment-focused parenting programme, in fostering maternal attitudes thought to underlie sensitive responding. Background: Effective parenting programmes are likely to mitigate negative outcomes associated with insecure attachment in infancy. Negative maternal attitudes and cog...

Supportive parenting is known to protect against psychosomatic manifestations of distress, yet the mechanisms through which this association operates are less clear. The present study evaluates children’s self-esteem as a mediator, partially explaining the association between parent–child relationship quality and psychosomatic problems from late ch...

Although we can support Heyes' call for more research on mechanisms, we disagree that the problem has been ignored as Heyes suggests. We also doubt that basic learning mechanisms are alone sufficient to account for the broad range of findings in the selective social learning literature. Although phylogenetically shared learning mechanisms must supp...

Recognizing that the object-directed actions of others are governed by goals and intentions is a crucial component of human interaction. These actions often occur rapidly and without explanation, yet we learn from and predict the actions of others with remarkable speed and accuracy, even during the first year of life. This review paper will serve a...

Prosocial behavior requires expenditure of personal resources for the benefit of others, a fact that creates a “problem” when considering the evolution of prosociality. Models that address this problem have been developed, with emphasis typically placed on reciprocity. One model considers the advantages of being selective in terms of one’s allocati...

To examine the extent to which infants encode the context of a goal-directed action, nine-month-old infants were tested in three separate experiments using a visual habituation paradigm similar to that used by Woodward (1998). Experiment 1, necessary to support methodology used in subsequent experiments, demonstrated that infants can track the goal...

This chapter presents a series of studies describing the social perception of helping and hindering—an ability that likely is integral to the maintenance of cooperative interactions. Two aspects of this perception are considered both in infants and adults: the detection of the actions (e.g., the interaction of motion patterns and goal attribution s...

Within the animal kingdom, human cooperation represents an outlier. As such, there has been great interest across a number of fields in identifying the factors that support the complex and flexible variety of cooperation that is uniquely human. The ability to identify and preferentially interact with better social partners (partner choice) is propo...

Studies of social cognitive reasoning have demonstrated instances of children engaging in eye gaze patterns toward correct answers even when pointing or verbal responses are directed toward incorrect answers. Findings such as these have spawned seminal theories, yet no consensus has been reached regarding the characteristics of the knowledge guidin...

This study investigates the diversity of early prosocial behavior by examining the ability of ninety-five 2- to 4-year-olds to provide aid to an adult experimenter displaying instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Children provided appropriate aid in response to each of these cues with high consistency over multiple trials. In...

When do humans become moral beings? This commentary draws on developmental psychology theory to expand the understanding of early moral behaviours. We argue that by looking at a broader range of other-oriented acts than what has been considered by Baumard et al., we can find support for the mutualistic approach to morality even in early instances o...

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). Nine‐months‐old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants’ goal‐attribution. Developmental Science. doi/10.1111/j.1467‐7687.2012.01151.x

Prosocial behaviors are a diverse group of actions that are integral to human social life. In this study, we examined the ability of 18- and 24-month-old infants to engage in three types of other-oriented behaviors, specifically helping, sharing, and comforting. Infants in both age groups engaged in more prosocial behavior on trials in which an unf...

The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate object...

Background: Impairments in the ability of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to engage in two fundamental social-cognitive skills (joint attention, imitation) are well documented (e.g., Charman et al., 1998). Whether these, and additional, forms of other-oriented behaviours are associated with generalized social challenges in this popula...

Individual differences in proneness towards granting benefits (i.e., helping) or imposing costs (i.e., hindering) may have led to processes that detect and remember people who are prone to help or hinder. We examined two factors that might influence such memory: the intentionality of the acts and individual differences in psychopathy characteristic...

One way to maintain cooperation between unrelated individuals and decrease the chance of providing costly aid to those who will not reciprocate is by selectively helping on the basis of the content of previous interactions. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the earliest instances of human helping behavior show specificity. In thr...

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli resu...

Research examining the development of social cognition has largely been divided into two areas: infant perception of intentional agents, and preschoolers' understanding of others' mental states and beliefs (theory of mind). Many researchers have suggested that there is continuity in social cognitive development such that the abilities observed in i...

Background: The interrelationship between early language development and an infant’s social world in typically developing (TD) children is well established (e.g., Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998; Aktar et al., 1991). For children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), who are often noted as having language difficulties,...

Background: Recent research has identified a positive relationship between early social-cognitive skills (e.g., joint-attention (JA), imitation, intentional understanding) and the production of cooperative behavior in children with autism (Colombi et al., 2006). Delays in social-cognitive skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are...

If our knowledge of human cognition were based solely on research with participants younger than the age of 2 years, there would be no basis for the relational reinterpretation hypothesis, and Darwin's continuity theory would be safe as houses. Because many of the shortcomings cited apply to human infants, we propose how a consideration of cognitiv...

The study of how animals learn, behave, and think, often from a comparative perspective, is the crux of animal cognition research. Recent topics explored in this field include understanding of abstract concepts, spatial learning and memory, imitation, representation of social relations, and examining the similarities between nonhuman primates and h...

Tomasello et al. have not characterized the motivation underlying shared intentionality, and we hope to encourage research on this topic by offering comparative paradigms and specific empirical questions. Although we agree that nonhuman primates differ greatly from us in terms of shared intentionality, we caution against concluding that they lack a...

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one com- monly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observ- ing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room. Three-yea...

Infants expect objects to be solid and cohesive, and to move on continuous paths through space. In this study, we examine whether infants understand that human beings are material objects, subject to these same principles. We report that 5-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks, but not to people. This sugge...

In our Brief Article (KBW, this issue), we present data showing that 5-month-old infants interpret the movements of inanimate objects according to the constraint of spatiotemporal continuity, but do not interpret peoples' motion according to this same constraint. We suggest from this finding that infants may possess distinct systems for learning, i...

The ability to interpret the behavior of other individuals is essential for effective social functioning. Many investigators now believe that even young infants can recognize that agents act toward goals. Here we report three experiments suggesting that 12-month-old infants not only can recognize goal-related action, but also can interpret future a...

We argue that the dance metaphor does not appropriately characterize language. Indeed, language may be a red herring, distracting us from the intriguing question of the nature of apes' social interactions.

It is well known that children's activities are full of pretending and imagination, but it is less appreciated that animals can also show similar activities. Originally published in 2002, this book focuses on comparing and contrasting children's and animals' pretenses and imaginative activities. In the text, overviews of research present conflictin...

In the present study, the contributions of spatial and object features to chimpanzees' comprehension of scale models were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously demonstrated the ability to use a scale model as an information source for the location of a hidden item were tested under conditions manipulating the feature correspondence and spatia...

The results from these preliminary studies show that chimpanzees are capable of understanding the relationship between a scale model or photographs of the corresponding real space. The results replicate and extend the innovative studies of similar skills in children (e.g., DeLoache, 1987, 1991) to a nonverbal species with whom previous attempts to...

The effects of modified procedures on chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) performance in a scale model comprehension task were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously participated in a task in which they searched an enclosure for a hidden item after watching an experimenter hide a miniature item in the analogous location in a scale model were retest...

The effects of modified procedures on chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) performance in a scale model comprehension task were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously participated in a task in which they serched an enclosure for a hidden item after watching an experimenter hide a miniature item in the analogous location in a scale model were reteste...

The ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to recognize the correspondence between a scale model and its real-world referent was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, an adult female and a young adult male watched as an experimenter hid a miniature model food in 1 of 4 sites in a scale model. Then, the chimpanzees were given the opportunity to find t...

Examined tool use in 15 captive lowland gorillas. Throughout the 17 hrs of observation, 283 sessions at the site of tool placement were evaluated. Ss were observed displaying the capacity for tool modification and innovating techniques for food retrieval using stick tools. The findings indicate that gorillas have the requisite cognitive capacities...

pBackground and Aims: Biological motion can be conveyed through capturing videos of humans walking with point lights attached to their major joints, thus eliminating the appearance of mass, depth, bodily features. Studies consistently show that adult observers immediately identify biological motion displays as a human walking (Johansson, 1973). Add...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-113). Advisor: Sarah Boysen, Dept. of Psychology.