Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Durham, U.K., 2003
E-mail: kplewis@txstate.edu
Phone: (512) 245-2473
Office: ELA 256

Research:

I am a physical anthropologist with an interest in the development and evolution of brains and behavior. I am especially interested in the value of early social interactions to the honing of the body and brain during sensitive periods of development, and how this may both reflect and contribute to the development and evolution of life in social groups. I am a proponent for the use of phylogenetic comparative methods to draw inferences about the past based on data from extant species, and in this pursuit much of my work concentrates on play and the origins of playfulness in animals. A further area of my current research takes a theoretical and statistical approach to human biological variation, and focuses on the scaling of regions of interest in the human brain.

Selected publications:

Lewis, K.P. & Barton, R.A. (2006). Amygdala size and hypothalamus size predict social play frequency in non-human primates: A comparative analysis using independent contrasts. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 1: 31-37.

Lewis, K.P., Jaffe, S., & Brannon, E.M. (2005). Analog number representations in mongoose lemurs (Eulemur mongoz): Evidence from a search task. Animal Cognition, 8, 4: 247-252.

Lewis, K.P. (2005). Social Play in the Great Apes. In P.K. Smith & A. Pellegrini (Eds.). The Nature of Play : Great Apes and Humans. Guilford: New York. Pp. 27-53.

Lewis, K.P. & Barton, R.A. (2004). Playing for keeps: Evolutionary relationships between the cerebellum and social play behaviour in non-human primates. Human Nature, 15: 5-22.

Lewis, K.P. (2000). A comparative study of primate play behaviour: Implications for the study of cognition. Folia Primatologica, 71: 417-421.

Courses Taught:
ANTH 2414: Introduction to Physical Anthropology
ANTH 3343/5543: Human Variation and Adaptation
ANTH 3375O/5374I: Primate Cognition
ANTH 3375F/5374H: Human Growth and Development
ANTH 3376C/5374L: Comparative Juvenile Behavior
ANTH 3376D/5374M: History of Evolutionary Thought
ANTH 5374P: Anthropological Statistics