Pam Yeh - How interactions among multiple stressors affect the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of populations
2019-04-15 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Pam Yeh: University of California, Los AngelesAll natural populations deal with multiple stressors. Yet there is limited understanding of how populations are impacted by higher-order interactions — more than two stressors. In this talk I will explain my new conceptual and experimental work to examine higher-order interactions among antibiotics in bacterial populations. I will also present recent work from my group that shows bacteria likely co-opted ancient stress response mechanisms to extreme temperatures in order to deal with more recent antibiotic stresses. This co-opting avoids the need for de novo evolution of response mechanisms to antibiotics.

Hazel Byrne - Molecular Neotropical Primatology: Titi Monkey Evolution
2019-04-22 00:00
Hazel Byrne: University of California, Los AngelesNeotropical primates are a diverse clade of primates that inhabit South and Central
America. Broadly speaking, in comparison to “Old World” primates originating in Africa and Asia, most Neotropical primates are strikingly understudied with many outstanding questions regarding their evolution. Among the least studied and appreciated groups are the monogamous pair-bonding titi monkeys (subfamily Callicebinae), yet titis are also among the most species rich primate radiations with over 30 species recognised. Prior to 2016, the only phylogeny focusing on titi monkeys was derived from morphological characters in the 1990’s, and owing to their morphological conservatism, the depth of diversity found in this clade was highly underestimated. The long-term assumption that titis represented a group of extremely similar primates impacted how we have studied them (i.e., existing research is based on a few “representative” species). This talk explores the insight gained into the evolutionary history of these enigmatic primates through molecular phylogenetic studies within the past three years. These studies have revealed deeply divergent titi lineages dating to the Miocene, uncovered a complex evolutionary history, and highlighted the consequences of previous assumptions for our already limited understanding of callicebine biology.

Katie Starkweather - “Why Risk It? Health Outcomes of Shodagor Women’s Work”
2019-04-29 00:00
Katie Starkweather: University of New MexicoGendered divisions of labor are an essential aspect of human life. The two primary components of the gendered division of labor – subsistence work and childcare – are critical for child survival, health, and well-being, as well as the reproductive success of parents. In most human societies, women and men display similar, gendered patterns of behavior in meeting the subsistence and childcare needs of the household. Human behavioral ecologists have developed theory to explain those trends, but still have very little understanding of deviation from them, particularly regarding women’s work. Among Shodagor people in Bangladesh, a semi-nomadic, boat-dwelling community, women’s work varies in the extent to which it adheres to cross-cultural norms of compatibility with childcare and risk aversion. This talk will highlight some of my recent work on the health outcomes and reproductive decision-making that are associated with women’s work when it is incompatible with childcare and produces high levels of economic risk. Preliminary evidence suggests that women who engage in these cross-culturally unusual behaviors are making tradeoffs related to child health and nutrition and are strategically making reproductive decisions that may allow them to maximize time spent working. I will discuss upcoming plans for a project that is based on based on these findings and involves a more detailed assessment of adult and child health outcomes as they relate to women’s work and childcare.

Lee Gettler - The biology of fatherhood in context: Evolutionary origins, cross-cultural perspectives, and implications for men’s health
2019-05-06 00:00
Lee Gettler: University of Notre DameHuman males have a flexible psychobiological capacity to respond to committed parenting with shifts in hormones such as testosterone, prolactin, and oxytocin. These findings hint at evolved neuroendocrine capacities that help facilitate refocused priorities as men make the transition into fatherhood. Evolutionarily, these capacities likely emerged alongside humans’ “slow” life history. Today, fathers commonly cooperate with mothers to raise children. However, their involvement and roles are variable, as they likely were evolutionarily. Thus, the nature of fathers’ hormonal shifts and their influences on behavior are shaped by the ecologies, cultural contexts, and family systems in which those fathering roles find expression. Evolutionary approaches to the biology of fatherhood often focus on the role of hormones, such as testosterone (T), as mechanisms mediating trade offs between competing mating and parenting demands. Meanwhile, clinical research in industrialized contexts has shown the mental and physical risks that can accompany “low T.” Men in contexts such as the US also experience post-partum depression and commonly have their physical health decline after becoming fathers (e.g. “dad bod”). Few efforts have been made to connect the dots between these sets of findings. Bringing together these perspectives using data from my research in the Philippines, Congo-Brazzaville, and the US, I will explore how men’s hormonal physiology variably responds to parenthood and relates to men’s family behaviors. I will then present recent work on how variation in paternal T relates to men’s risks for depression and chronic disease and will explore these perspectives through the lens of evolutionary medicine, particularly the idea that the biology of fatherhood may be mismatched to the expression of parenthood for men in some contemporary societies.

Brian Wood - Hadza hunter-gatherer movement ecology and the sexual division of labor
2019-05-13 00:00
Brian Wood: University of California, Los AngelesHumans think about, explore, and use landscapes like no other species, reflecting our unique biological and cultural adaptations. One of these adaptations, observed in all hunter-gatherer societies, is a gendered division of foraging labor. The impacts that gendered economic roles have upon space use is a critical concern for evolutionary accounts of social organization and spatial cognition, but is not well understood. Behavioral ecology models propose that the rarity and mobility of targeted resources should predict movement patterns, and that strong gender differences in space use should emerge in a hunting and gathering context, owing to the different kinds of foods that men and women target. To test these ideas, I examine space use among the Hadza, recorded using GPS devices over 2,078 person-days of observation. In this talk, I will also present measures of spatial cognition, and examine correspondences between measures of cognition and spatial behavior.

James Liu - Collective Remembering across Generations and across Cultures: Evidence for National Narrative Templates, Developmental Variants, and Global Anchors
2019-05-17 00:00
James Liu: Massey University, New ZealandWhat is universal, what is characteristic of national political culture, and what is regionally influenced in the “living memory” of national history for people around the world? Selected data a reported from a massive multi-generational adult sample (N>27000) collected online in 2018-19, representative of 42 societies around the world). In responding to the question “Name 3 historic events that have occurred during the lifetime of people you know (or have known) that have had the greatest impact on your country”, historical foreshortening (i.e., nominating very recent events like the last election) was more common than generational differences. World War II was not nearly as dominant as in previous studies where events in world history were nominated, with 9/11 forming an alternative anchor for living memory in the United States. This passing away of WWII from living memory may weaken the soft power of the United States in other parts of the world. Points of difference between societies were far more salient than the few commonly shared global events, but there were some structural features shared in the collective remembering of developing societies around the world (e.g., from colonization to independence and reform). Prospects for convergence, divergence, and mutual friction are discussed, focusing on the Great Powers of China, Russia, the United States; as well as countries in the European Union, and Islamic societies.
A new measure of historical consciousness is proposed and used to examine the shape of national historical narratives, between individuals and across cultures. Degree of historical consciousness may be treated as an individual difference, consisting of both ability to recall collective events and openness to societal influences like mass media or the state. Different clusters of historical events informed different narratives of national identity within a given country, and these were systematically associated with important features of political psychology, like predispositions for prejudice versus for system justification, and the propensity to trust others and institutions in society. Living memory appears to be temporally malleable, as it is highly responsive to immediate crises facing society, but it is also anchored to foundational events spanning three generations.

Courtney Meehan - The social worlds of infants, moms, and microbes
2019-05-20 00:00
Courtney Meehan: Washington State University Throughout our evolutionary history, and in much of the world today, human infancy has been characterized by a host of ancestral traits which include frequent maternal-infant contact, on-demand breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and cooperative breeding. These ancestral characteristics have, in part, supported the development of our altricial infants and enabled reproductive success in diverse environments, despite women’s narrow reproductive window and the costs associated with simultaneously rearing multiple dependent children. Here, I argue that these ancestral traits also serve as a critical pathway by which mothers and infants communicate, via microbiota, about their environment, priming the infant for the world in which he or she will be reared. Utilizing cross-cultural data on infant’s early environments and human milk composition, I characterize the diverse caregiving worlds of infants and explore how our early social environments and mothers’ life history characteristics are associated with the human milk microbiome (HMM). Human milk, once thought to be sterile, contains a diverse microbial community and as an early and consistent source of bacteria to infants, it is an important factor in the colonization of the infant gastrointestinal microbiome. Yet, the origins and role of the HMM are not yet fully understood. Our results identify multiple associations between maternal life history characteristics, our ancestral caregiving traits, and the HMM, providing initial evidence suggesting bi-directional maternal-infant communication during breastfeeding and that human milk composition may be socially-mediated.

Kotrina Kajokaite - Testing hypotheses about social cognition with observational data: coalitions in white-faced capuchin monkeys
2019-06-03 00:00
Kotrina Kajokaite: University of California, Los AngelesCoalitionary recruitment offers a window into animal social cognition. However, naturally observed coalitionary conflicts are challenging to analyze because the researcher has no control over the context in which they occurred, and observed behavior patterns are typically consistent with multiple explanations. In this talk, I will present analyses of observational data of coalitionary solicitations during conflicts in wild capuchin monkeys, Cebus capucinus, collected at Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve, Costa Rica. In this study we employed a statistical technique that models monkeys’ choices of allies during coalitionary conflicts while taking into account not only the attributes of the chosen individual, but also of the other individuals who were available to be solicited for help. This statistical technique also allows to simultaneously compare different hypotheses regarding which cues monkeys use and how these cues interact. Our analysis shows that capuchin monkeys use information about both relationship quality and dominance when recruiting allies during conflicts. Monkeys primarily use rank when recruiting an ally, but will also use relationship quality, particularly when the potential ally has low rank. This study provides evidence that nonhuman primates are able to classify other group members using multiple criteria simultaneously. In addition, this study presents a statistical technique that animal researchers can use to infer decision rules from observational data.

Kristi Lewton - Birth, bipedalism, and the evolution of the human hip
2019-09-30 00:00
Kristi Lewton: University of Southern CaliforniaLocomotion, gestation, and childbirth have had a significant impact on human culture and biology, including the morphology of the human hip. One of the most fundamental features of the human lineage is walking on two legs, and the emergence of this novel behavior had spectacular evolutionary consequences; the advent of material culture, extensive migrations and landscape use, and complex systems of trade were all contingent on obligate bipedality. Humans also have unusually large neonates, which has been thought to result in an ‘obstetrical dilemma’ in which there is an evolutionary tradeoff in females between having hips wide enough to accommodate the birth of a large infant, but also narrow enough to allow for efficient bipedal locomotion. This research uses integrative methods including biomechanical models, the comparative method, and morphological integration to examine tradeoffs, constraints, and adaptations of the human pelvis.

Brooke Scelza - Husband, Lover, Pater, Genitor: Paternity and concurrency in northwest Namibia
2019-10-07 00:00
Brooke Scelza: University of California, Los AngelesResearch on human mate preferences has been conducted mainly in industrialized societies, where multiple mating and concurrent partnerships are heavily stigmatized. However, cross-culturally, extra-pair partnerships are more common, and there is significant variation in the acceptance of such relationships, particularly for women. In order to better understand how a system of concurrency can be maintained, I will present data from 10 years of fieldwork with Himba pastoralists living in northwest Namibia, a culture where nonmarital partnerships are both common and normatively sanctioned. After presenting demographic data on the rates of concurrency and paternity in this population, I will discuss the potential benefits to women of having multiple partners, using both quantitative and qualitative data. Next, I will explore the reasons why men might tolerate, or even support, such a system, despite the paternity loss that accompanies non-marital sex. Finally, I will discuss how social norms about extra-marital sex, jealousy and paternal care support a system of concurrency in this population.

Lynette Shaw - Cognition, Culture, and Complexity: Modeling the Emergence of Shared Social Realities from Individual Mental Representation
2019-10-14 00:00
Lynette Shaw: University of MichiganThe cultures we belong to affect far more than our practices and beliefs – they also fundamentally shape how we perceive the world, each other, and ourselves. Many rich theoretical traditions in the social sciences and humanities have emphasized these “socially constructed” aspects of our experienced realities. To date, however, insights in this arena have largely resisted formal specification and modeling. In this talk, I will show how this historical barrier can be transcended by using insights from complex systems to theorize how the individual, automatic cognition responsible for reflexive sensemaking in situations (i.e. mental representation and associative processing) can, in social contexts, account for the emergence of shared social realities and a suite of other recognizable cultural dynamics. I conclude the talk by discussing how this perspective can be used to build further analytical extensions and to develop new approaches to the empirical study of social construction.

Terry Deacon - On Human (Symbolic) Nature: How the Word Became Flesh.
2019-10-21 00:00
Terry Deacon: University of California, BerkeleyAbstract: The concept of human nature has been challenged by social scientists because
of its inability to clearly delineate the distinction between the biologically inherited and
experientially acquired attributes of being human. Yet the very fact of being susceptible to acquired cultural influences irrelevant to other species makes clear that this is an evolutionarily constrained susceptibility. Symbolic processes are the source of the most important and distinctively human acquired influences, and include both linguistically mediated and habitually reproduced social conventions. Susceptibility to these influences arose due to the evolution of neurological adaptations that support symbolic communication and cognition. Although human brains do not include any structures that lack ape homologues, the slight reorganization that made symbolic abilities ubiquitous has also created the possibility for socially transmitted information to radically reorganize mental functions. In this talk I re-analyze the concept of symbolic reference in order to overcome equivocal and ambiguous uses of the concept that obscure the special nature of these adaptations and thus blind research to the complex bio-cultural interactions that produce some of the most ubiquitous and unprecedented features of being human. These include modifications of memory functions, emotional experiences, the nature of identity, and the range of mental plasticity.

Tao Gao - Modeling Theory of Mind for Competition, Cooperation and Communication
2019-10-28 00:00
Tao Gao: University of California, Los AngelesTheory of mind (ToM) refers to the attribution of an agent’s motion to its mental states, including belief, desire and intention. Modeling ToM is built upon two principles. First, the “rationality principle” (utility theory), assuming that an agent takes actions to maximize its utility. Second, the Bayes’ theorem, solving ToM by maximizing the posterior of mental states conditioning on the observed actions. A model of ToM is a model of social commonsense that can explain a wide range of human interactions. I will start from a zero-sum chasing game, in which a human-controlled prey detects and avoids a computer-controlled predator. Both human and modeling results show that perceived chasing is severely disrupted when the predator’s actions violate the rationality principle, enabling the predator to stalk the prey stealthily. ToM becomes more prominent in cooperative tasks. Multi-agent ToM is challenging due to its recursive nature: I infer your inference of my inference of you. Here I advocate an “Imagined We”(IW) approach that avoids this recursion trap. “We” is defined as a super-agent that can rationality and centrally control all agents as body parts to maximize the joint utility. However, this “We” agent does not exist in reality. Instead, each agent actively imagines what We believes, and follows “what We wants me to do” voluntarily. IW predicts spontaneous “role assignment” and “goal commitment”. Furthermore, IW also serves as a cognitive infrastructure of human communication. I will show that the combination of cooperative logic, utility theory, and Bayes’ theorem strongly constrain the interpretation of even highly ambiguous signals, enabling humans to communicate so much by expressing so little.

Johanna Eckert - The Evolutionary Roots of Intuitive Statistics
2019-11-04 00:00
Johanna Eckert: University of California, Los AngelesIntuitive statistics is the capacity to draw intuitive probabilistic inferences based on an understanding of the relations between populations, sampling processes, and resulting samples. This capacity is fundamental to our daily lives and one of the hallmarks of human thinking. We constantly use sample observations to draw general conclusions about the world, use these generalizations to predict what will happen next and to make rational decisions under uncertainty. Historically, statistical reasoning was thought to develop late in ontogeny and to remain error-prone throughout adulthood. In the last decade, however, evidence has accumulated from developmental research showing that even pre-verbal infants can reason from populations of items to randomly drawn samples and vice versa. These new insights raise a fundamental question concerning the phylogenetic origins of intuitive statistics: Is it a uniquely human capacity, perhaps accounting for our unprecedented cognitive flexibility? Or do we share it with other animals, most notably our closest living relatives, the nonhuman great apes? We adapted a paradigm previously used in developmental research to study intuitive statistical abilities in sanctuary- and zoo-living apes. Specifically, we explored the generality and flexibility of apes´ statistical capacities, their cognitive structures and limits, and their interaction with knowledge from other cognitive domains. Our findings indicate that apes possess statistical capacities on a par with those of human infants. Intuitive statistics, therefore, antedate language and mathematical thinking not only ontogenetically, but also phylogenetically. Hence, humans´ statistical abilities are most likely founded on an evolutionary ancient capacity shared with our closest living relatives.

Caitlin O'Connell - The costs and benefits of sociality explored in the semi-solitary orangutan
2019-11-25 00:00
Caitlin O’Connell: University of Southern CaliforniaSocial relationships are an integral part of primate life for humans and non-humans alike, but the extent to which a primate devotes its time and energy to socializing can vary tremendously within and between species. With a semi-solitary social system, orangutans present a unique opportunity to examine both social and solitary conditions within a single population to test predictions regarding the costs and benefits of sociality. While the socioecological model predicts that orangutans display reduced sociality compared to other apes, this should affect individuals differently across life history stages. This research examines the variation in social behavior among age-sex classes in wild orangutans using social interactions, behavioral and hormonal indicators of stress, and intestinal parasites to evaluate the reasons orangutans socialize or remain solitary at different times. Adolescent females were found to socialize the most, to suffer the lowest physiological cost from socializing, and to employ unique behavioral strategies to mitigate potentially risky social situations. My findings highlight the adolescent period as behaviorally distinct and socially rich for female orangutans who face unique challenges as members of a socially dispersed species with high levels of sexual coercion.

Max Kleiman-Weiner - Reverse Engineering Human Cooperation
2019-12-02 00:00
Max Kleiman-Weiner: Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyHuman cooperation is distinctly powerful. We collaborate with others to accomplish together what none of us could do on our own; we share the benefits of collaboration fairly and trust others to do the same. I seek to understand these everyday feats of social intelligence in computational terms. I will present a formal framework based on the integration of individually rational, hierarchical Bayesian models of learning, together with socially rational multi-agent and game-theoretic models of cooperation. First, I investigate the evolutionary origins of the cognitive structures that enable cooperation through social learning. I then describe how these structures are used to learn social and moral knowledge rapidly during development. Finally I show how this knowledge is generalized in the moment, across an infinitude of possible situations: inferring the intentions and reputations of others, distinguishing who is friend or foe, and learning a new moral value.

Rafael Nuñez - Is there really a biologically evolved capacity for number? Quantical vs. numerical cognition and the biological enculturation hypothesis
2020-01-27 00:00
Rafael Nuñez: University of California San DiegoIs there a biologically endowed capacity specific for number and arithmetic? A widely accepted view in cognitive neuroscience, child psychology, and animal cognition gives an unproblematic ‘yes’ for an answer to this question, claiming that there is a biologically evolved capacity specific for number and arithmetic that humans share with other species. However, data from various sources—humans from non-industrialized cultures, trained nonhuman animals in captivity, and the neuroscience of symbol processing in schooled participants—do not support this view. The use of loose and misleading technical terminology in the field of “numerical cognition” has facilitated the elaboration of teleological arguments which underlie the above view. To understand this, a crucial distinction between quantical and numerical cognition is necessary: Biologically evolved preconditions (BEPs) for quantification do exist (quantical cognition), but the emergence of exact symbolic quantification and arithmetic proper (numerical cognition)—absent in nonhuman animals—has materialized via cultural preoccupations and practices that are supported by language and symbolic reference—crucial dimensions that lie largely outside natural selection. In this talk I’ll discuss the biological enculturation hypothesis, which attempts to explain the complex passage from quantical to numerical cognition.

Josh Armstrong - The Social Origins of Universal Grammar
2020-02-03 00:00
Josh Armstrong: UCLAContemporary linguistic theory takes the generative features of language use as a central focus of study. Many linguists—most notably Noam Chomsky—have maintained that explaining these generative features of language requires an appeal to a human language faculty or a universal grammar: a biologically guided, species-typical, set of cognitive procedures for building linguistic meanings in ways that are highly creative but also highly constrained. My talk explores the evolutionary origins of universal grammar. I will argue that contemporary human individuals are indeed biologically prepared for language in ways that Chomsky and others have maintained, but that an explanation of why this is so is inexorably bound up with social facts and processes. There are, I argue, substantive social prerequisites on initial biological emergence of universal grammar and on the subsequent persistence and spread of universal grammar across human or hominin populations. This social conception of the evolution of universal grammar integrates internal and external approaches to linguistic theory and provides a straightforward explanation of the generative features of language use.

Cailin O'Connor - Dynamics of Equity
2020-02-10 00:00
Cailin O’Connor: University of California IrvineWhy do some groups get more and others less? And why is this sort of pattern so pervasive across human cultures? In this talk, I’ll discuss cultural evolutionary modeling work that address these questions. In particular, I look at the dynamics of bargaining and coordination in cultural evolution when groups are divided into social categories such as gender and race. These models make clear why inequity is so common, and also suggest an approach towards improving equity.

Robert Seyfarth - The social origins of language
2020-02-24 00:00
Robert Seyfarth: University of PennsylvaniaDespite their differences, human language and the vocal communication of nonhuman primates share many features. Both constitute a form of joint action, rely on similar neural mechanisms, and involve discrete, combinatorial cognition. These shared features suggest that during evolution the ancestors of modern primates faced similar social problems and responded by evolving similar systems of perception, communication and cognition. When language later evolved from this common foundation, many of its distinctive features were already in place.

Kensy Cooperrider - Fifteen ways of looking at a pointing gesture
2020-03-01 00:00
Kensy Cooperrider: University of California San DiegoThe human pointing gesture may be viewed from many angles. On a
neutral description, it is an intentional movement, often of the hand, by which one person tries to direct another’s attention—it is, in short, a bodily command to look. But this bland definition is only a start. Pointing may also be seen as a semiotic primitive, a philosophical puzzle, a communicative workhorse, a protean universal, a social tool, a widespread taboo, a partner of language, a part of language, a fixture of art, a graphical icon, a cognitive prop, a developmental milestone, a diagnostic window, a cross-species litmus test, and an evolutionary stepping-stone. These fifteen ways of looking highlight the diverse dimensions of one our most unassuming, ubiquitous behaviors. Pointing appears so widely, and in so many guises, because of what it embodies: a distinctively human preoccupation with attention.

Robbie Burger - Metabolic scaling, brain size, pace of life history, and the rise of hyper-dense cities
2020-03-16 00:00
Robbie Burger: University of ArizonaMetabolic scaling provides a universal theoretical framework to evaluate the life history trade-offs and population consequences across the tree of life. In this talk I will present new research applying metabolic scaling theory to brain size and the pace of living in birds and mammals. I will then present new extensions of metabolic scaling to understand the non-linear trade-offs in growth and mortality and size and number of offspring across animals. I will end by applying metabolic scaling to understanding the unique exta-metabolic energy use of modern humans that has led to the unprecedented rise in human hyper-density with implications for cultural evolution and rapid global change.

Heidi Lyn - Dogs, Apes, Dolphins, and Environment Effects on Communication and Cognition
2020-04-06 00:00
Heidi Lyn: University of South AlabamaThe study of animal communication and cognition has a long history, and one that frequently focuses on the human lineage (looking for homologous traits). In recent years, true comparative cognition has become more frequently reported in the literature. However, these studies can often be flawed, with many researchers failing to account for methodological changes that accompany a change in species. In addition, there is a strong tendency to assume that all differences in evidence between species are biological in nature. I will describe examples of these problematic studies and interpretation with special emphasis on how human environments can change cognitive and communicative capabilities in dolphins, dogs, and apes.

Ryan Nichols - Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding: Theoretical, Methodological, and Statistical Problems
2020-04-13 00:00
Ryan Nichols: Cal State University FullertonFootbinding refers to a historical practice of the Han Chinese involving, typically, the repeated ritual wrapping of the feet of young girls, often involving the breaking of toes, in an effort to create small. This presentation presents and discusses the Labor Market theory of footbinding (Brown et al. 2012; Bossen et al. 2011; Gates & Bossen, 2017; etc.). According to the Labor Market theory, footbinding’s maintenance over 1,000 years is explained as the product of a profit motive on the part of parents with daughters, whose sewing and weaving labor was possible only if their feet were bound. This theory asserts that footbinding’s origins and cessation are also explained due to forces regulating the market price of girls’ handicraft labor. The neo-Marxist Labor Market theory reigns as the most popular interdisciplinary explanation of footbinding. Despite this, a close study of its key findings reveals poor theoretical motivation, methodological problems, and repeated irregularities in use of accompanying data. Normally retesting a dataset would resolve many of these issues. However, Labor Market theory team members Melissa Brown, Hill Gates, and Laurel Bossen continue to decline requests by several scholars for access to their data.

Barry Bogin - Stunting is not a synonym of malnutrition
2020-04-20 00:00
Barry Bogin: Loughborough University & University of Michigan-DearbornThe World Health Organization defines stunting as, “…impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation.” Most of the recent research literature equates stunting with malnutrition, less with infection, and rarely with psychosocial issues. In contrast, most of the historic literature indicates that growth in height is largely independent of the extent and nature of the diet. We are sceptical that the estimated global prevalence of 150 million stunted infants and children is due to under-feeding. Systematic reviews of modern nutrition interventions find no impact on linear growth. We hypothesise that the majority of stunted infants and children are suffering from the social-emotional stresses of poverty – stresses that antagonize skeletal growth hormones.

Colin Allen - 40 Years On: The Quest for a Scientific Philosophy of Animal Minds
2020-04-27 00:00
Colin Allen: University of Pittsburgh2020 marks the 40th anniversary* of the publication of the pioneering work on vervet monkey alarm calls by Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, and Peter Marler, as well as the 30th anniversary of the publication of Cheney & Seyfarth’s book How Monkeys See the World. Although not everyone was as willing as they were to embrace the label of “cognitive ethology” — coined by Donald Griffin in 1978 — the shift from Griffin’s anecdotal approach to seemingly fuzzy ideas about animal consciousness to a broader, more experimental approach to animal cognition over the past four decades is, by a variety of measures, a story of scientific success. New societies, new journals, new experiments, a big increase in the range of taxa studied, and even some new university departments, all contribute to the sense that the field of comparative animal cognition a progressive one. There is also a new generation of philosophers of animal mind who are collaborating closely with scientists. Despite all this, comparative cognition remains in what Thomas Kuhn would have called a “pre-paradigmatic” state. It lacks unifying theories and methods, and there is little consensus even about the right questions to ask. In this talk I will consider a range of explanations for this state of affairs, and address the question of what, if anything, should be done differently.

Alison Gopnik - Life history and learning: Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions
2020-05-04 00:00
Alison Gopnik: University of California BerkeleyI argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several very new studies from our lab and others suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.

Gordon Burghardt - The Origins, Evolution, and Functions of Play
2020-05-18 00:00
Gordon Burghardt: University of TennesseeOur understanding of the evolution, phylogeny, and functions of playfulness in animals is surprisingly minimal, largely because the function of play in both human and nonhuman animals remains controversial. Consequently, biologists have typically ignored play. After all, something frivolous and fun cannot be too important as compared to feeding, mating, fighting, and rearing young. In recent years, however, much research has advanced our understanding of play. This includes identifying play and its diversity, the neuroscience of play, the ontogeny and functions of play, and theoretical and modeling contributions. This talk will explore some of this recent work and where play research may be heading.

Matt Cartmill -
2020-06-01 00:00
Matt Cartmill: Boston University

L. Ian Reed - The communicative functions of facial expressions
2020-10-05 12:00 - 13:30
The communicative functions of facial expressions
L. Ian Reed
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, NYU
Previous research suggests that some facial expressions of emotion serve a communicative function by signaling private feelings and action tendencies. Further, some expressions such as smiles and scowls affect receivers by increasing the credibility of accompanying verbal and/or written statements. Here, I will discuss the credible signaling hypothesis and the evidence in support of it. This will include a discussion of experiments using economic games to create strategic situations in which facial expressions of emotion might benefit signalers and receivers. These experiments test whether a signaler’s emotional expressions increase the credibility of promises, threats, claims of danger, and assurances of trustworthiness. The results speak to the hidden strategies behind spontaneous and deliberate expressions and their effects on receiver’s behavior.
