The developmental psychologist capturing the diversity of children’s experiences
Manuel Bohn is learning more about the development of cognition by studying children and great apes
Manuel Bohn is a developmental psychology researcher at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. Manuel studies how children’s everyday experiences affect their cognitive development. He is working with young children and great apes to find clues to how cognitive abilities evolved over time. Annie Brookman-Byrne talks with Manuel about capturing children’s experiences in the real world and collaborating with multiple labs to generate large samples of data.
Annie Brookman-Byrne: Is there a specific mystery in developmental psychology that drives your research?
Manuel Bohn: Humans are so different from one another. There is so much diversity in the way we grow up, where we live, and how we interact. Nevertheless, all of us are similar in many ways. I am fascinated by the tension between our differences and similarities. Can we identify the universal essence of development? With all the diversity out there in the world, what is the common thread running through all of us?
“I am fascinated by the tension between our differences and similarities.”
ABB: What are you investigating in your studies?
MB: I am looking into how children become functioning members of society. Social, cognitive, and communication skills allow us to absorb the cultural world around us. Humans have developed writing systems and languages to learn these skills from one another. I’m investigating how children’s experiences drive the development of such abilities. For example, what do children do at home, in their everyday lives, and do these things impact the way their social cognition and communication develop? I focus on the kindergarten period, children aged three to six.
I also look at human development from an evolutionary perspective, which involves comparative work with great apes. How do great apes think and communicate? What is unique to human cognition, and what is shared with our closest living relatives? I’m proud to be part of the ManyPrimates Project, a large-scale collaboration in primate cognition research that we launched in 2017. We study primates to make inferences about the evolutionary history of cognitive abilities. That requires a large and diverse sample, but individual research labs usually focus on just one species. We convinced labs all over the world to collaborate on a single project, which allowed us to reconstruct the evolution of short-term memory. That was a big achievement that we hope will change how people do research.
ABB: What changes have you seen in child development research over time?
MB: There have been massive changes in the way researchers capture children’s everyday experiences. We’ve moved away from recording how children interact with their parents in an artificial lab setup towards observing them in the real world. Language development researchers paved the way, recording children’s audio environment using wearable devices. Others have gone on to record everyday experiences on video. That has changed the raw material we work with. There’s a stronger emphasis on making sure that the methods we’re using actually capture individual children’s development.
These changes have brought with them new ways of analysing this data. One of my PhD supervisors said it’s not data until you’ve coded it – so video footage is not data. We’re developing automated coding algorithms that use machine learning to code the videos, which we can then analyse.
“Ultimately, I hope all of this will help us to intervene in children’s lives in a positive way and provide them with experiences that will benefit their development.”
ABB: What impact will this research have?
MB: I hope it will help us describe the diversity of children’s everyday experiences across cultural settings, enabling us to understand just how variable the human experience is. I also hope to identify the experiences that are beneficial to children’s social, cognitive, and communication development. That understanding will lead to a robust theory of how children acquire certain abilities. Ultimately, I hope all of this will help us to intervene in children’s lives in a positive way and provide them with experiences that will benefit their development.
This research is just getting started. We are currently developing the necessary methods, as we don’t yet have the tools for a comprehensive study of this area. It is still too early to determine precisely which experiences are beneficial, but in the future we will be able to draw conclusions backed up by solid data.
ABB: What are your hopes for the future in this field?
MB: I would like to see a move towards a more collaborative way of working, in which we agree on the important questions to study and pool resources to develop methods that can be applied to various cultural settings. Working together, we will be able to build a solid empirical basis for generalisable theoretical statements. We’re already seeing a move away from studies conducted by a single lab, with just a handful of children; it’s very difficult to draw conclusions from the data generated by such studies that generalise to a larger number of children. Because of how research is funded and carried out, however, single-lab studies have been the norm. I hope we can overcome this barrier and move towards a more collaborative approach to science.
Footnotes
Manuel Bohn studied Psychology in Vienna and New York. He earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, studying the cognitive and communicative abilities of great apes and human infants. After completing a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Stanford University, he returned to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as a Senior Scientist before accepting a position at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Manuel is a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow 2023-2025.
Website: https://manuelbohn.github.io/
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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