Anne Warlaumont: University of California, MercedHumans use a wide variety of types of vocal signals to communicate with other humans. Some of these sounds, such as crying, shrieking, and laughing, are thought to be closely related to those of our primate relatives. Others, especially babbling, speaking, and singing, appear to rely to a great extent […]

Athena Vouloumanos: New York UniversityLike many animals, human infants have biases for the vocalizations of their own species, preferring speech to many non-speech sounds just hours after birth. How do these early proclivities develop and how do they contribute to human communicative development? In her talk, Athena Vouloumanos will draw from behavioral and neural data […]

Jerry Siegel: UCLAHow did humans sleep before the modern era? Because the tools to measure sleep under natural conditions were developed long after the invention of the electric devices suspected of delaying and reducing sleep, we investigated sleep in three preindustrial societies. We find that all three show similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express […]