Lydia Hopper, Ph.D.
I joined the Language Research Center in January 2010 and I am a Post Doctoral Associate working with Dr Sarah Brosnan on an NSF-funded project entitled ‘Understanding Responses to Inequitable Outcomes in Non-human Primates’.
I gained my PhD in 2008 from the University of St Andrews, UK, where I was supervised by Professor Andrew Whiten in the School of Psychology. The focus of this research was identifying the underlying mechanisms of social learning. For this I used a comparative approach, studying both human children and nonhuman primates, namely chimpanzees. I believe that this is an engaging topic because it has implications for the evolution of human culture as well as providing a fundamental understanding of learning strategies employed by us and other species. Through my on-going collaboration with Dr. Rachel Kendal, Durham University, UK, I maintain my involvement in this area and we are currently developing statistical methods for the identification of social learning among wild populations of animals.
After the completion of my PhD I was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Emma Flynn, Durham University, UK, researching social learning in children for a project entitled ‘The Development of Social Learning in Children: The Interplay Between Imitation and Emulation’.