Student Profiles

Peter Blake, Human Development and Education

Examining why children fight over toys led HGSE doctoral student Peter Blake to spend time with four species of apes this summer.

Blake researches child development using comparative methods, focusing specifically on property and ownership and the psychology of stealing. With both pre-verbal children and primates, researchers can't ask what they think so it's necessary to design experiments that will produce different behaviors and infer the thought process from those behaviors, he said.

As part of a Mind, Brain, and Behavior grant, Blake traveled to Germany where he spent two months working at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig this summer. His research centered on primate thinking, and he worked with renowned comparative and developmental psychologist Mike Tomasello.

"It was an excellent environment and great experience," Blake said. "I took the developmental perspective [I learned at HGSE] with me and began to develop the comparative."

At the institute, Blake designed an experiment that examined whether apes were sensitive to human transactions and acts of stealing. The experiment involved apes observing one adult taking an object from the other and pretending to hurt the person. Through the experiment, Blake wanted to test whether apes would react to the more dominant human.

"Although the apes were very excited by the fight between humans, they did not choose to help the winner of the fight and returned the object equally," Blake said. "The results were not conclusive, but this experiment showed us that from an orangutan's perspective, dominance may not be the most important factor in deciding who to help or who has a right to an object. Given the strong dominance hierarchies in this species, we expected the winner would be favored."

Blake believes such studies can provide some explanation for the origins of these human behaviors.

Although working with the primates was a rewarding experience (when they weren't demolishing his apparatus), the data collected on apes didn't make the biggest impact on his experience--his colleagues did.

"I was able to watch 10 other experiments and learn what did and didn't work in the past," Blake said. "The exchange of information [among colleagues] was just great."

So great that Blake said he hopes to return to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship to continue his work with animals.

"I've learned that apes are amazing animals and worth studying," he said. "Apes are fascinating because they are incredible problem solvers and yet have a very different mental profile from humans. Like us, they learn some things very easily while other tasks prove very difficult. By comparing human cognitive abilities with those of other primates we can learn a lot about how we learn."