Andreas Wilke

Assistant Professor
Psychology Department
171 Science Center
PO Box 5825
Potsdam, NY 13699-5825

Phone: 315-268-7023
Fax: 315-268-7118
E-mail: awilke@clarkson.edu

Education:
Ph.D., Free University of Berlin, 2006

Courses Taught:
Introduction to Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Human Cognitive Evolution, Learning and Memory

Research Interests:
Over evolutionary time, humans had to solve difficult information-processing problems, such as finding food and finding a mate, in an uncertain world. My primary interest is in this human cognitive evolution, specifically, the evolution of human judgment and decision-making capacities. The central questions motivating my research are these: how has the evolutionary process shaped the cognitive mechanisms underlying human decision-making behavior under risk and uncertainty? How do these mechanisms operate in domains such as risk taking, mate choice, and foraging for food and information?

To answer these questions, I have adopted an interdisciplinary approach grounded firmly in the theory and methods of cognitive psychology but drawing on ideas from evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, and anthropology. Appropriately, my training has been interdisciplinary. After completing my diploma in cognitive psychology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, I joined the International Max Planck Research School LIFE, which emphasizes the study of systematic changes in human behavior over evolutionary and ontogenetic time. LIFE takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together doctoral students from such diverse disciplines as biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and educational science and provides them with opportunities for collaborative research and supervision at cooperating institutions in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. Recently, I have been a postdoctoral research fellow both at the Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC), UCLA Department of Anthropology as well as the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria.

To date, my research has investigated a variety of topics in human cognitive evolution. I have examined, for instance, the question of how risk taking differs across different domains of everyday life, how it should be defined and measured, and how an evolutionary perspective can help explain why young men in particular are very risk prone. My present research focuses on cognitive adaptations underlying decision making under uncertainty in foraging. I have investigated whether the same mechanisms animals use in foraging for patchy resources are also shared by humans and used in novel tasks such as searching for physical resources or information on the Internet. I am also currently investigating whether people bring to bear heuristics or assumptions about the patchiness of resources and whether these underlie certain well-known phenomena of human judgment, such as the “hot hand” fallacy. In this research, I have expanded my methods to include cross-cultural comparative experiments in a foraging society in Amazonian Ecuador. I am an active collaborator with researchers in adjacent disciplines and regularly interact with other fields of psychology by applying my findings, for example, to research in developmental and clinical psychology. Further information about my research and the collaborators I work with can be found on my personal webpage: www.clarkson.edu/~awilke

Publications (Last 5 years):
Haselton, M. G., Bryant, G. A., Wilke, A., Frederick, D. A., Galperin, A., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Moore, T. (in press). Adaptive Rationality: An evolutionary perspective on cognitive bias. Social Cognition.

Mata, R., Wilke, A., & Czienskowski, U. (2009). Cognitive aging and adaptive foraging behavior. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 64, 474–481.

Wilke, A. & Barrett, H. C. (2009). The hot hand phenomenon as a cognitive adaptation to clumped resources. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 161–169.

Wilke, A., Hutchinson, J. M. C, Todd, P. M., & Czienskowski, U. (2009). Fishing for the right words: Decision rules for human foraging behavior in internal search tasks. Cognitive Science, 33, 497–529.

Wang, X. T., Kruger, D. J., & Wilke, A. (2009). Life-history variables and risk-taking propensity. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 77–84.

Barrett, H. C., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Wilke, A. (2008). Adaptation to moving targets: Culture/gene coevolution, not either/or (Commentary on M. H. Christiansen and N. Chater, Language as shaped by the brain). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 511–512.

Hutchinson, J. M. C., Wilke, A., & Todd, P. M. (2008). Patch leaving in humans: Can a generalist adapt its rules to dispersal of items across patches? Animal Behaviour, 75, 1331–1349.

Panchanathan, K. & Wilke, A. (2007). Modelling for Field Biologists and Other Interesting People by Hanna Kokko. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 447–450.

Kruger, D. J., Wang, X. T., & Wilke, A. (2007). Towards the development of an evolutionary valid domain-specific risk-taking scale. Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 555–568.

Wilke, A., Hutchinson, J. M. C., Todd, P. M., & Kruger, D. J. (2006). Is risk-taking used as a cue in mate choice? Evolutionary Psychology, 4, 367–393.

Wilke, A., Todd, P. M., & Hutchinson, J. M. C., & Mata, R. (2006). Das adaptive Problem der Ressourcensuche. In H. Hecht, S. Berti, G. Meinhardt, & M. Gamer (Eds.), Proceedings of the 48th annual meeting of the “Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen” (p. 317). Lengerich, Germany: Pabst.

Brighton, H., Mata, R., & Wilke, A. (2006). Reconciling vague and formal models of language evolution (Commentary on J. L. Locke and B. Bogin, Language and life history: A new perspective on the development and evolution of human language). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 282.

Hanoch, Y., Johnson, J. G., & Wilke, A. (2006). Domain-specificity in experimental measures and participant recruitment: An application to risk-taking behavior. Psychological Science, 17, 300–304.

Mata, R., Wilke, A., & Todd, P. M. (2005). Adding the missing link back into mate choice research (Commentary on D. Schmitt, Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe. A 48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 289.

Wilke, A. (2005). Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction by Roger Lewin. Human Ethology Bulletin, 20, 6–8