The Department of Developmental Psychology investigates how children become part of the society they grow up in. The focus of our research lies in communicative and cognitive development during the  preschool years. We take a broad and interdisciplinary perspective on development: we use cross-cultural comparative studies to shed light on the diversity of developmental pathways and to test the generalizability of psychological theories. We use species comparative studies with non-human primates to study the evolutionary origins of human communication. Our goal is to explain the dynamic interplay between social, cognitive, and communicative development in a comparative context.