BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture - ECPv6.15.20//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://bec.ucla.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20150308T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20151101T090000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20160313T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20161106T090000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20170312T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20171105T090000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161003T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161003T000000
DTSTAMP:20260511T030501
CREATED:20200922T220901Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T005124Z
UID:4395-1475452800-1475452800@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Gandhi Yetish - Sleep  as an Evolved Behavior: Ecological Opportunity Costs and Sleep Optimization
DESCRIPTION:Gandhi Yetish: University of New MexicoShort\n sleep duration is associated with numerous\, sometimes severe\, negative health outcomes\, and yet many people report regularly sleeping insufficiently. Part of the challenge in improving poor health practice lies in the fact that a consensus definition of “good”\n sleep remains lacking. In the scope of my dissertation research\, I (with many collaborators) have sought to implement an evolutionary and ecological perspective to address this issue (in part). We argue that sleep is not only as a physiological state of being\,\n but as a behavior of sorts\, regulated by shifting opportunity costs. In this talk\, I will present three semi-independent studies that together test the hypothesis that sleep on any given night is a flexible phenotype (or reaction norm) that responds dynamically\n to short-term needs. The first study presents findings from Yetish et al.\, 2015\, which compares sleep among three independent small-scale societies (Hadza\, San\, Tsimane) to assess the degree to which post-industrial sleep patterns reflect a pathological shift\n in chronic sleep patterns (answer: little\, if at all). The second two studies present early findings from works-in-progress that test the effects on sleep from two different types of opportunity costs: productivity and vigilance. Using a mixture of accelerometry\n (for objective sleep measurements) and quantitative ethnographic interviews (for behavioral insights)\, we investigated how the need to procure food and the degree of exposure in a sleeping site affect sleep patterns among Tsimane hunter-horticulturalists in\n Amazonian Bolivia\, and find support for the proposed opportunity cost tradeoff model of sleep optimization.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/gandhi-yetish-sleep-as-an-evolved-behavior-ecological-opportunity-costs-and-sleep-optimization/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161010T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161010T000000
DTSTAMP:20260511T030501
CREATED:20200922T220901Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T005124Z
UID:4394-1476057600-1476057600@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Michelle Brown - Choose Your Battles: Individual Motivations for Participation in Collective Aggression
DESCRIPTION:Michelle Brown: University of California\, Santa BarbaraGroup?level competition has important effects on individual fitness and is thought to be a crucial force in the evolution of complex social systems. However\, such conflicts represent a collective action problem: if all group members share the spoils of battle but only a few incur the costs of fighting\, why do participators tolerate free?riders and continue to provide a collective good? In humans\, this problem is surmounted by punishing defectors and rewarding participants\, but these mechanisms have not been observed in other group-living species. In a large-scale study of redtail monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) at the Ngogo site in Kibale National Park\, Uganda\, I test the underlying assumption that a collective action problem is an inherent feature of intergroup conflicts. In particular\, I ask whether participants and defectors experience differing costs and similar benefits during conflicts\, measured as changes in energy balance. My research indicates that individual motivations fluctuate over time\, but individuals can nonetheless be categorized as either conditional participants or conditional defectors.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/michelle-brown-choose-your-battles-individual-motivations-for-participation-in-collective-aggression/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161017T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161017T000000
DTSTAMP:20260511T030501
CREATED:20200922T220241Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T005123Z
UID:4341-1476662400-1476662400@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:David Lawson - Is polygynous marriage a harmful cultural practice?
DESCRIPTION:David Lawson: University of California\, Santa BarbaraRecent years have witnessed a widening commitment to achieving gender equality at a global scale\, with corresponding\, and often controversial\, shifts in international and domestic policy. In developing world regions\, this includes efforts to abolish long-held cultural institutions that are ostensibly harmful to women. Yet such efforts are largely driven by good intentions and ethnocentric rhetoric\, rather than theoretically or empirically driven insights. In this talk I interrogate the claim that polygynous marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa represents a ‘harmful cultural practice’. Using evolutionary anthropology as a guiding theoretical framework\, I review the extant literature on polygyny and its consequences and present the results of a recent study of marital status\, food security and child health in Tanzania spanning over 50 villages. I conclude that polygynous marriage cannot be considered universally harmful\, and that future research and policy must pay greater attention to identifying locally realizable alternatives and context dependency when considering the health implications of cultural practices.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/david-lawson-is-polygynous-marriage-a-harmful-cultural-practice/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161031T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20161031T000000
DTSTAMP:20260511T030501
CREATED:20200922T220234Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T005123Z
UID:4338-1477872000-1477872000@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Andrew Whalen - Integrating Social Learning Into Models of Reinforcement Learning
DESCRIPTION:Andrew Whalen: University of EdinburghSocial learning and asocial learning are sometimes seen as two conflicting ways in which individuals make decisions and learn about the world around them. Increasingly research has found that instead of being two conflicting learning processes\, individuals\, including children\, will combine social and asocial sources of information to make decisions. One approach to understanding how social information might be integrated into other learning processes is by studying already well established models of human and animal learning. We present work that tries to understand how social information might be integrated into models of reinforcement learning\, particularly temporal difference (TD) learning. Using a series of simulations we demonstrate that\, unlike other simulation studies that treat social and asocial learning separately\, social learning is nearly always beneficial\, and that small amounts of social learning allows for the formation of stable traditions of complex socially transmitted behaviors in artificial populations. To better understand how social and asocial information is combined in humans\, we ran a series of experiments to analyze how social learning impacts reinforcement learning\, and find that individuals use social learning both to choose the actions that they perform\, and as a secondary reinforcer that alters the associations they build between actions and rewards. These results highlight the importance of understanding how social and asocial sources of information are integrated on fine temporal scales for understanding the evolution of social learning and human culture.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/andrew-whalen-integrating-social-learning-into-models-of-reinforcement-learning/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR