Humans are capable of making inferences about other individuals' intentions and goals by evaluating their actions in relation to the constraints imposed by the environment. This capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior to draw inferences about an individual's mental states. Presently unclear is whether this capacity is uniquely human or is shared with other animals. We show that cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques, and chimpanzees all make spontaneous inferences about a human experimenter's goal by attending to the environmental constraints that guide rational action. These findings rule out simple associative accounts of action perception and show that our capacity to infer rational, goal-directed action likely arose at least as far back as the New World monkeys, some 40 million years ago.

In this paper, we present the DeepTree exhibit, a multi-user, multi-touch interactive visualization of the Tree of Life. We developed DeepTree to facilitate collaborative learning of evolutionary concepts. We will describe an iterative process in which a team of computer scientists, learning scientists, biologists, and museum curators worked together throughout design, development, and evaluation. We present the importance of designing the interactions and the visualization hand-in-hand in order to facilitate active learning. The outcome of this process is a fractal-based tree layout that reduces visual complexity while being able to capture all life on earth; a custom rendering and navigation engine that prioritizes visual appeal and smooth fly-through; and a multi-user interface that encourages collaborative exploration while offering guided discovery. We present an evaluation showing that the large dataset encouraged free exploration, triggers emotional responses, and facilitates visitor engagement and informal learning.

This paper presents the results of a study which examined children's ideas about speciation. Two groups of elementary school students, 9‐year‐olds and 12‐year‐olds, were interviewed using a semi‐structured questionnaire. The results indicate that several children explain the phenomena of speciation in terms of consistent explanatory frameworks that strongly resemble either early Greek or renaissance variants of Essentialist theories in biology. The core beliefs of such frameworks constrain the types of solutions that are generated for a variety of biological problems.

The ability to understand and reason with tree-oflife diagrams (i.e., cladograms), referred to as tree thinking, is an essential skill for biology students. Yet, recent findings indicate that cladograms are cognitively opaque to many college students, leading them to misinterpret the information depicted. The current studies address the impact of prior biological background and instruction in phylogenetics on students' competence at two foundational tree-thinking skills. In study one, college students with stronger (N052) and weaker (N060) backgrounds in biology were asked to (a) identify all the nested clades in two cladograms and (b) evaluate evolutionary relatedness among taxa positioned at different hierarchical levels (two questions) and included in a polytomy (two questions). Stronger-background students were more successful than weaker-background students. In study two, a subset of the stronger-background students (N0 41) who were enrolled in an evolution class subsequently received two days of instruction on phylogenetics. As expected, these students' tree-thinking skills generally improved with instruction. However, although these students did very well at marking the nested clades, fundamental misinterpretations of relative evolutionary relatedness remained. The latter was especially, although not exclusively, the case for taxa included in a polytomy. These results highlight the importance of teaching cladistics, as well as the need to tailor such instruction to the difficulties students have learning key macroevolutionary concepts.