Dr. Annie Wertz

Annie E. Wertz is a Research Group Leader (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she leads the independent Max Planck Research Group “Naturalistic Social Cognition.” She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009 and then worked as postdoctoral researcher in the Yale University Infant Cognition Center until 2014. Her research interrogates the evolution and development of cognition, with a particular focus on social learning mechanisms. Her work provided the first evidence that human infants possess behavioral and social learning strategies that are selective to plants. Along with her research group, she conducts laboratory studies and naturalistic observations of human infants and young children, and engages in collaborative cross-cultural and comparative research projects to examine the design and development of selective social learning mechanisms.

 

HBES 2021 Plenary Address:

How Plants Shape the Mind

Life is mostly plants. Plants constitute an estimated 80% of the biomass on Earth and are concentrated in terrestrial environments. Millions of animal species rely on plants to survive and the organismic design of plants and animals have been tightly interwoven in intricate ways over evolutionary time. As a corollary, the cognitive design of any animal that is dependent on plants must bare the markers of this relationship. While this logic has been a driver of research on nonhuman animals, it has received surprisingly little attention in the human cognitive sciences. In this talk, I outline some of the ways that plants have shaped the human mind. I will begin with a task analysis of plant foraging that focuses on the problem of identifying specific plants. Then I will present findings from recent studies of infants and young children that address two aspects of this task analysis: 1) distinguishing plants from other entities and 2) categorizing different types of plants and plant parts. I will argue that these aspects of cognitive design are integral components of social learning systems for acquiring information about plants, and demonstrate that plants have structured the design of fundamental cognitive capacities.