Erica Cartmill

Erica Cartmill is a Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, and Animal Behavior at Indiana University, where she also holds appointments in Psychology and Informatics. Erica’s research explores the evolution of language and social cognition. She takes a comparative and developmental approach in her work; her COMPARE lab studies great apes, human children, and companion dogs (among other species). She is particularly interested in the complex relationships between language and thought: what types of cognition provide the foundations for language and what types are, in turn, supported by it. Erica also aims to identify and combat the biases humans have when asking questions about non-human minds. She argues that the way we ask questions about other minds (biological or artificial) is strongly skewed by the things we value in our own species. Erica is an interdisciplinary scholar who employs a variety of methods in her work. She studied linguistics, biology, and theater at Swarthmore College and then completed a Fulbright in cultural and intellectual history in Poland. She earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews for work on orangutan gestural communication, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago on language acquisition in young children. Her first faculty appointment was at UCLA, where she held positions in Anthropology and Psychology before moving to IU in 2024. Erica is co-chair of the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG) conference series, an interdisciplinary community of scholars exploring the origins of language. Erica co-founded and co-directs the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) and the Center for Possible Minds (CPM) at Indiana University. Both DISI and CPM aim to bring together scholars across a wide range of disciplines to ask questions about the nature of mind in biological and artificial forms.

Erica is interested in the evolution of language and cognition. She approaches these questions through a comparative lens, asking how different species communicate, solve problems, and navigate social interactions.