Senay Cebioglu's research while affiliated with Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and other places

Publications (6)

Article
The authors examined similarities and differences in Canadian and ni‐Vanuatu caregivers' child‐directed speech to their toddlers (N = 35, Mage: 21 months, 20 girls). Speech samples were collected (2013–2016) during free play and analyzed with a focus on describing parents' references to their toddlers. Canadian caregivers referred significantly mor...
Article
Humans are extraordinary in the extent to which we rely on cumulative culture to act upon and make sense of our environment. Teaching is one social learning process thought to be fundamental to the evolution of cumulative culture as a means of adaptation in our species. However, the frequency of teaching and how we teach are known to vary across hu...
Article
Infant‐directed speech (IDS) is phonetically distinct from adult‐directed speech (ADS): It is typically considered to have special prosody—like higher pitch, and slower speaking rates—as well as unique speech sound properties, e.g. more breathy, hyperarticulated, and/or variable consonant and vowel articulation. These phonetic features are widely o...
Article
Mirror self-recognition (MSR) is considered to be the benchmark of objective self-awareness-the ability to think about oneself. Cross-cultural research showed that there are systematic differences in toddlers' MSR abilities between 18 and 24 months. Understanding whether these differences result from systematic variation in early social experiences...
Article
Full-text available
We examine the opportunities children have for interacting with others and the extent to which they are the focus of others’ visual attention in five societies where extended family communities are the norm. We compiled six video-recorded datasets (two from one society) collected by a team of anthropologists and psychologists conducting long-term r...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies have proposed that social norms play a key role in motivating human cooperation and in explaining the unique scale and cultural diversity of our prosociality. However, there have been few studies that directly link social norms to the form, development and variation in prosocial behaviour across societies. In a cross-cultural study o...

Citations

... Experiments with adults and adolescents indicate that exposure to formal education can indeed shift people's teaching strategies. For example, ni-Vanuatu adults whose communities embrace schooling have been found to use more diverse teaching behaviors than those from communities without schooling (Boyette et al., 2022). Liberian students and those proficient in local scripts also provide more verbal exposition than nonliterate counterparts (Scribner & Cole, 1981). ...
... In many cultures, most caregivers speak to children in a different speech register, infant-or child-directed speech (IDS or CDS;Fernald & Simon, 1984;Hilton et al., 2022;Kitamura & Burnham, 2003;McClay et al., 2022;Soderstrom, 2007;Warren-Leubecker & Bohannon, 1984). IDS or CDS may reflect adaptations that serve three different and complementary functions for the listener. ...
... Finally, [11] aims at providing behaviour tool analysis by offering segmentation, identification, pose-estimation and classification of behaviour from homecage cameras. Well adapted, such a method may be resourceful for behaviour analysis in simple context [1] and help in the automatic acquisition and annotation of video recordings. ...
... When they are accompanied by others, toddlers in small scale rural communities may be more likely to have child, as opposed to adult social partners and caregivers. In an extensive review of hundreds of ethnographies that included accounts of early child care practices in small scale communities, Weisner and Gallimore (1977) found that 40% of infants and 80% of toddlers were cared for primarily by someone other than the mother, most often an older sister (but see Broesch et al., 2021). This pattern also is common across hunter-gatherer societies worldwide (Migliano et al., 2017). ...
... Children at this age are cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally, and socially developing: they build their self-esteem, their mood changes, and they acquire skills in communicating personal experiences and feelings [16]. They have a level of cognitive maturity that enables mental health representations and stigma to develop [17], and they are particularly prone to receive accurate mental health information [18]. At this age, children are a perfect target population for early interventions to modify the trajectory of many mental health issues, prevent progression to more chronic conditions, and promote resilience. ...