Michael Tomasello

Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Leipzig, Germany.  His research interests focus on processes of social cognition, social learning, and communication/language in human children and great apes.  Books include First Verbs (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Primate Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997); The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1999); Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Harvard University Press, 2003); Origins of Human Communication (MIT Press, 2008), and Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009)