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X-WR-CALNAME:Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture
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X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110207T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110207T000000
DTSTAMP:20201013T004821Z
CREATED:20200922T214828Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004821Z
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SUMMARY:Derek E. Lyons - The social roots of artifact culture: Overimitation and the development of children’s causal understanding
DESCRIPTION:Derek E. Lyons: Post-Doctoral Scholar; UC Irvine Department of InformaticsChildren are generally masterful imitators\, both rational and flexible in their acquisition of knowledge from the observation of others. A phenomenon that we have termed overimitation (Lyons\, Young\, & Keil\, 2007)\, however\, initially seems a curious exception to this rule. After observing an adult intentionally operating an unfamiliar object with a sequence of relevant and irrelevant actions\, children will frequently imitate not only the actions that were causally necessary\, but also those that were clearly superfluous. Indeed\, children will overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees readily ignore (Horner & Whiten\, 2005). Prior explanations for overimitation tended to see it as a byproduct of social motivations (e.g. a desire to “be like” the adult or to accommodate inferred task demands)\, but we have argued that the phenomenon may have deeper significance. Our hypothesis is that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object\, they may automatically encode all of the adult’s actions as causally meaningful\, restructuring their causal beliefs about the object accordingly. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects; however\, in the case where some of the adults’ intentional actions were unnecessary\, it would also lead to stubborn overimitation. In this talk I will undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis\, reviewing prior evidence as well as offering three new experiments to further test the theory. Our new data show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so imposes a direct and motivationally salient cost\, thus underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect. At the same time\, however\, overimitation is not unbounded: the effect is strictly coupled to intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may offer an important window not only on the structure of children’s causal understanding\, but also on the social learning processes that help to support our species’ artifact-centric culture.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/derek-e-lyons-the-social-roots-of-artifact-culture-overimitation-and-the-development-of-childrens-causal-understanding/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110214T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110214T000000
DTSTAMP:20201013T004821Z
CREATED:20200922T214829Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004821Z
UID:4160-1297641600-1297641600@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Brian Wood - Household and Kin Provisioning by Hadza Males
DESCRIPTION:Brian Wood: Stanford Department of AnthropologyIn this research\, we use newly collected data describing how Hadza men’s foods were produced\, shared\, and consumed in order to elucidate the general motivations underlying\, and consequences of\, Hadza male foraging strategies. We test predictions of the showoff\, costly signaling\, household provisioning\, and kin provisioning hypotheses\, finding strong support for the latter two. We find that Hadza men foraged for a range of food-types\, including fruit\, honey\, small game\, and large game. Our data indicate that men shared the foods they produced in ways that directly benefitted their own households as well as their consaguineal and affinal kin living in other households. Our work indicates that large game hunting was one important element of men’s foraging strategies but not an exclusive specialization. These results differ from prior investigations of the Hadza\, in which it was argued that men specialized in hunting large game for its status benefits\, rather than pursuing other types of foods and more effectively feeding their households. We discuss how and perhaps why our studies differ. We also explore how camp demographics\, seasonality\, and men’s marital status influenced their food production and sharing.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/brian-wood-household-and-kin-provisioning-by-hadza-males/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110225T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110225T000000
DTSTAMP:20201013T004821Z
CREATED:20200922T214835Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004821Z
UID:4164-1298592000-1298592000@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Ádám Miklósi - Dog-human social interaction: Old wine in new bottles?
DESCRIPTION:Ádám Miklósi: Eötvös University Department of EthologyFor longer than we can remember dogs and humans have been friends. While both humanity and dogs benefited from this relationship\, science has not shown any interest in the “Whys” and “How-s” until recently. However\, the last 15 years have pushed the dog into the middle ground\nof comparative investigations that aim to understand the evolution and mechanisms of social behavior.  \nIn this presentation I will present a simple descriptive model for convergent\nbehavioral evolution of dog social behavior in the anthropogenic environment. The central\nexample will describe how in a very simple way dogs may have adapted to the pedagogical\nnature of humans. We have good experimental evidence that dogs can be attracted to human\ncommunicative intent\, to human referential signals\, and may learn about the referent. Parallel\nwork has shown that this ability shows strong parallels to early pedagogical interaction\nbetween human infants and caregivers but rests probably on different mechanisms. In any\ncase\, the dogs’ receptiveness to human social signals enhances their survival in our social\nniche.  \nBased on these findings we can put forward a more general model of social behavior in the\ncase of inter-specific relationships\, introducing the concept of social competence. It turns out that\nthis may be particularly useful in recent research which is aimed to envisage a “new world” of\nhuman-artificial agent social interaction.\nhttp://bec.ucla.edu/papers/MiklosiPaper.pdf
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/adam-miklosi-dog-human-social-interaction-old-wine-in-new-bottles/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110228T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110228T000000
DTSTAMP:20201013T004821Z
CREATED:20200922T214829Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201013T004821Z
UID:4161-1298851200-1298851200@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Sarah Mesnick - Sperm whale social structure: kith and kin. Implications for behavior\, culture and conservation
DESCRIPTION:Sarah Mesnick: Southwest Fisheries Science Center\, NOAA Fisheries ServiceKnowledge of the genetic structure of social groupings provides the basis for understanding the relative influences of kin selection and reciprocity in the evolution of individual behavior and for understanding the basis of population structure\, which is important for conservation. Sperm whale\, Physeter macrocephalus\, groups comprised of females and dependent young were once thought to be strictly matrilineal\, with a social structure similar to that of African elephants. We investigated this hypothesis using samples from 3 completely sampled mass strandings in Tasmania (n = 11\, 37\, 64 individuals respectively) and 55 partially sampled groups from the eastern North Pacific. We used mitochondrial (400 bp of the hypervariable control region) and nuclear (six microsatellites and 36 single nucleotide polymorphisms) markers and the sex of individual sperm whales to estimate genetic relatedness within and among groups. The preliminary results indicate that sperm whale groups were not purely matrilineal in structure. Rather\, groups were comprised both of individuals that had no close relations and of individuals accompanied by potential first and second order relations\, some potentially related through their fathers and others through their mothers. Groups were composed of mixed matrilines\, as evidenced by the presence of 1 – 5 mtDNA haplotypes (maternally inherited) per group. The mean coefficient of relatedness for the completely sampled groups ranged from 0.15-0.27. The groups were comprised of small clusters of related individuals although in all groups there were several individuals with no relations closer than those expected by chance. Pairs of individuals with high coefficients of relatedness\, but different mtDNA haplotypes\, were consistent with patterns of paternal half sibs. Three subadult males with unique mtDNA haplotypes were found among a group of adult females indicating that their mothers were not present\, an unexpected finding. Some old (and very old) females\, some of whom were accompanied by close relatives and others not\, were lactating. These results cause us to rethink the relative influences of kin selection and reciprocity in the evolution of individual behavior (e.g.\, babysitting\, communal defense). We suggest that for the sperm whale\, and other cetacean species that live\, raise young and contend with predators in the open ocean\, the integrity of the bonds developed through association\, cooperation and lactation\, are as strong as blood relations.  \nFor this presentation\, I will summarize what is known about sperm whale social and population structure from recent genetic work in our laboratory and observations of social interactions at sea. Additional insights from the acoustic research of colleagues provide the background for cross disciplinary\, cross- taxa discussion on three topics: (a) social structure within females groups and observations during an attack by killer whales; (b) social transmission of a novel foraging behavior (depredation on demersal long lines) among adult males in Alaska; and (c) population structure – geographically defined stocks and culturally defined clans – for conservation and management.\nhttp://bec.ucla.edu/papers/MesnickPaper1.pdfhttp://bec.ucla.edu/papers/MesnickPaper2.pdfhttp://bec.ucla.edu/papers/MesnickPaper3.pdf
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/sarah-mesnick-sperm-whale-social-structure-kith-and-kin-implications-for-behavior-culture-and-conservation/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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