Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Social learning is a fundamental element of human cognition. Learning from others facilitates the transmission of information that helps individuals and groups rapidly adjust to new environments and underlies adaptive cultural evolution. While basic human propensities for social learning are traditionally assumed to be species-universal recent empirical studies show that they vary between individuals and populations. Yet the causes of this variation remain poorly understood. Here we show that interdependence in everyday social and economic activities can strongly amplify social learning.

This special issue investigates the role emotions played and play in the creation of feeling communities in South Asia. The topics range from the central role, which appeals to compassion had in the creation of the Muslim community in the 19th century (Margrit Pernau), the contributions of novels to the mobilization of feelings and people in the 20th century (Christina Oesterheld) ...

Psychological heuristics are formal models for making decisions that are easy to understand, apply and explain. This article presents the conditions under which psychological heuristics perform on par with or even better than more complex standard models and discusses the role that psychological heuristics can play in theory and practice of operational research (OR).

Evidence for experience-dependent structural brain change in adult humans is accumulating. However, its time course is not well understood, as intervention studies typically consist of only two imaging sessions (before vs. after training). We acquired up to 18 structural magnetic resonance images over a 7-week period ...

In this study, we looked at masked morphological priming effects in German children and adults beyond mean response times by taking into account response time distributions. We conducted an experiment comparing suffixed word primes (kleidchen-KLEID), suffixed nonword primes (kleidtum-KLEID), nonsuffixed nonword primes (kleidekt-KLEID) ...