The Human Brain in the Animal Kingdom

Dr. Erin Hecht received her BS in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego in 2006 and her PhD in neuroscience from Emory University in 2013. Before moving to Harvard, she was a research scientist in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University and an affiliated scientist at the Emory National Primate Research Center at Emory University. Hecht joined the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University in January 2019, where she directs the Evolutionary Neuroscience Lab and the Canine Brains Project. Hecht's research asks how brains change in response to selection pressure on behavior and how brains acquire heritable adaptations for complex, learned behaviors. Comparisons between modern humans and our living primate relatives provide a way to address this question in the context of our own evolutionary history. In addition, we can learn about general mechanisms of brain-behavior evolution by studying unnatural selection in intentionally-bred animals. Current areas of focus include neural and behavioral variation in domestic dog breeds and domesticated foxes, neural plasticity in humans during the acquisition of skills for which we have innate predispositions, and the relationship between individual variation in initial brain anatomy and predisposition to acquire new learned skills. The lab's methods include structural and functional neuroimaging in living humans and dogs and fixed brains of various species; histology; and behavior measurements.