9458111 Povinelli This award provides support to Dr. Daniel Povinelli under the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Awards program. The objective of this program is to recognize outstanding young faculty in science and engineering, to enhance the academic career of recent PhD recipients by providing flexible support for research and educational activities, and to foster contact and cooperation between academia, industry, and institutions that support research and education. Dr. Povinelli has already made significant research contributions to the field of physical anthropology, and he has the potential to become a leader in academic research and education. This award will allow the investigator to build on his existing research on self-awareness and to undertake series of studies of chimpanzees and young children's understanding of agency, intention, and knowledge and belief, in both themselves and others. The research holds promise of making considerable progress toward constraining our interpretations of the psychology underpinning complex social behavior in chimpanzees. Furthermore, it will allow a determination of the extent of overlap in human and chimpanzee cognitive development related to mental state attribution. This will allow evolutionary biologists to produce more precise reconstructions of the primitive cognitive features of the great ape-human clade, as well as a determination of the more derived features of human cognition.
