Profile
Abstract
Since 2020, Katja Liebal is the head of the Human Biology and Primate Cognition group at the Faculty of Life Sciences and since 2024, she is the director of the LeipzigLab at Leipzig University. She studied biology and completed her doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig before working as a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and as a junior professor in the Excellence Cluster Languages of Emotion at Freie Universit?t Berlin in the fields of cross-species and cross-cultural psychology.
She studies the development and cultural variability of children's attitudes towards other living beings in an interdisciplinary network with cooperation partners in 18 countries. She also investigates the communicative, emotional and social-cognitive abilities of primates, including humans, how these abilities develop in the first years of life and how developmental trajectories differ between humans and other apes.
Professional career
- since 06/2020
Head of the group Human Biology and Primate Cognition, Faculty of Life Sciences, Institute of Biology, University of Leipzig - 04/2015 - 05/2020
Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology, Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universit?t Berlin - 04/2009 - 03/2015
Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Excellence Cluster "Languages of Emotion", Freie Universit?t Berlin - 04/2005 - 08/2008
Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, UK - 07/2001 - 02/2005
PhD Student, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig; Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology
Education
- 10/1995 - 05/2001
Biology (Diploma), University Leipzig
My research interest is dedicated to two central questions:
1. How do human attitudes towards other living beings develop and how do they vary across cultural contexts?
Using interviews, behavioral studies and various methods of anthropology, we investigate how children's attitudes towards animals develop in different societies and how these attitudes vary depending on age, socio-cultural context and the role of an animal species in a society, using an international research network with local cooperation partners from more than 30 communities in 18 countries.
2. Which communicative and cognitive abilities are uniquely human and which do we share with other primates?
We investigate the gestural and facial communication of non-human primates in comparison to humans and how their forms of communication develop during the first years of life. A further research focus is on prosocial behavior, such as helping or sharing resources, in connection with the question of the role of empathy, which we investigate in different great ape species and children in different cultural contexts.
To answer these questions, we combine a cross-species and cross-cultural approach and use observational and non-invasive experimental methods.
I teach Human Biology (Bachelor Biology and Teaching Biology) and Diversity of Cognition (Master Neuroscience and Behavior).
Research fields
Comparative Cognition , Behavioral Biology
Specializations
Human-nature relationship
Cultural variability of human behavior
Gestural and mimic communication of non-human primates
Prosocial behavior of nonhuman and human primates