Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Evelina Fedorenko - The human language system in the mind and brain
2021-01-11 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
The human language system in the mind and brain
Evelina Fedorenko
McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT
The goal of my research program is to understand the computations and representations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI, we have since extended this approach to other modalities, like MEG and electrocorticography. Using this functional-localization approach, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g., speech processing) and motor (e.g., articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. I will highlight three key findings from our work. First, I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes—from math and music, to executive processes, to non-verbal semantic cognition, and even processing computer code—while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. Second, I will show that, contra many leading accounts, the language regions support both understanding of word meanings and sentence-structure building, with no part of the language network being selective for syntactic processing. Further, the ‘temporal integration window’ of the language system is only a few words long—in line with the fact that most dependencies among words are local across the world’s languages—and appears to be relatively insensitive to word order. Finally, I will present recent evidence of predictive coding in the language network during naturalistic comprehension, and show that state-of-the-art artificial neural network language models—optimized for predictive processing—accurately capture neural responses during language comprehension. The latter line of work is a critical first step to developing mechanistic accounts of language comprehension.

Aaron Panofsky - Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research
2021-01-04 12:00 - 13:30
Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research
Aaron Panofsky
UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology
This talk presents research from a study about white nationalists and their efforts to appropriate genetics research for their own ideological and identity projects. Using historical sources and online data and interpretive methods, I show that ideas from genetics have been prominent in public pronouncements and in online discussions among white nationalists. For example, they discuss genetic ancestry tests to demonstrate pure European/white ancestry, population genetics to “prove” the biological reality of race, genetic anthropology to argue for the preservation of white “biodiversity,” and behavior genetics to claim the intellectual and behavioral superiority of whites. Through the 20th century there was a cadre of professional scientists eager to promulgate racist interpretations of genetics research, but facing effective scientific and ethical opposition by other researchers, their ranks and authority greatly attenuated in the 21st. White nationalists have relied on these scientists for scientific racist ideas, but with their decline, white nationalists have crafted themselves into a loose citizen science movement. I show that their activities include gathering and promulgating the claims of academic scientific racists, reinterpreting ostensibly non-racist genetics in racist ways, and using publicly available statistics and data to generate novel racist analyses, and exploiting the affordances of “open science” to mimic the institutional form of disciplinary science. This movement’s bid for authority is based on their claim that they represent the true spirit of scientific objectivity and a willingness to pursue data and arguments that have been suppressed by the academy, which has been overcome by political correctness.

Rebecca Saxe - What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture
2020-12-07 12:00 - 13:30
What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture
Rebecca Saxe
McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Nearly all research on “theory of mind” has focussed on three kinds of inference: (i) explaining observed behaviour in terms of inferred mental states (given she did that, what did she want?); (ii) morally evaluating observed behaviour in terms of mental states (how much blame does she deserve for causing that harm, given what she believed and wanted?); or (ii) predicting future behaviour from mental states (given she believes that, what will she do next?). My own work on the neural basis of theory of mind likewise mostly focusses on these inferences. We have characterized a domain-specific representation of other people’s beliefs, desires and intentions and studied its cortical implementation. However, these days I think that the scientific concept of theory of mind has been seriously impoverished, and the focus on a narrow set of operationalizations of this important cognitive capacity is limiting scientific progress. In particular, I think we need to focus more on theory of mind: (iv) about the causes of emotions, and (v) as a causal model that supports intentional intervention. For future work, I will argue that we should focus on how people reason about other minds in order to try to change them.

Hugo Mercier - Impression management as signaling
2020-11-30 12:00 - 13:30
Impression management as signaling
Hugo Mercier
Evolution and Social Cognition and Collective Intelligence Teams, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris
I claim that impression management can be usefully understood as signaling. One consequence is that impression management should be mostly honest, that is, it should benefit on average both senders (i.e. those who are managing the impression they give), and receivers (i.e. those who are evaluating others). This contrasts with the view that self impression is largely deceptive (and thus requires self-deception). I highlight two main mechanisms through which impression management can remain mostly honest. First, people who attempt to create misleading impressions (e.g. that they are more confident, smart, etc. than warranted) are reputationally punished once they are found out. Second, some impression signals entail inherent tradeoffs that make them costly, and thus honest (e.g. signaling that one is nice can entail signaling that one is not dominant). I will present experimental evidence demonstrating both mechanisms.

Willem Frankenhuis - Hidden talents in harsh conditions
2020-11-23 12:00 - 13:30
Hidden talents in harsh conditions
Willem Frankenhuis
Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
It is well established that people living in adverse conditions tend to score lower on a variety of social and cognitive tests. However, recent research shows that people may also develop ‘hidden talents’, that is, mental abilities that are enhanced through adversity. The hidden talents program sets out to document these abilities, their development, and their manifestations in different contexts. In this talk, I present studies of cognitive adaptations to harsh and unpredictable environments. These studies have been conducted among individuals with different levels of exposure to adversity in the Netherlands and the United States.
No video is available for this talk.

Pascal Boyer - Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture
2020-11-16 12:00 - 13:30
Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture
Pascal Boyer
Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology​ and Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, Washington University in St. Louis
Divination is a good example of a cultural attractor – almost all human societies have some documented form of divination, a procedure that supposedly guarantees the truth of the statements it produces. I propose a model of the strategic interactions around divination that may explain why the practice is so widespread, with some unexpected commonalities. This is an opportunity to think about cultural evolution, which so far has produced good models of cultural consumption, leaving aside why people produce the kind of material that become culturally widespread.

Samuel Mehr - Representation and understanding in music across cultures
2020-11-09 12:00 - 13:30
Representation and understanding in music across cultures
Samuel Mehr
The Music Lab and Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about our psychology of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses of the Natural History of Song Discography, which includes songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, and experiments using these songs. We find that acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their primary behavioral functions across cultures. Adult listeners worldwide are sensitive to this fact, in that they accurately infer behavioral functions even when the songs are from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages. Such effects are not, however, merely a result of musical or cultural experience: both young children and infants show comparable effects, with little evidence for increases in sensitivity across ages. Moreover, high-level representations of musical behaviors are apparently enabled by lower-level processing of pitch and duration information into tonal and metrical representations. These cognitive phenomena may form a foundation for a universal psychology of music underlying culturally varying phenomena, such as musical aesthetics.

Zaneta Thayer - How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms
2020-11-02 12:00 - 13:30
How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms
Zaneta Thayer
Department of Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program, Dartmouth College
A remarkably consistent pattern of human variation is the social gradient in health. This is the observation that, both within and between societies, individuals who are socially disadvantaged tend to have poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancy than individuals who are more socially advantaged. In this talk I will use data from Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States to discuss how exposure to early life stressors in particular can shape disparities in health across the life course. I will also discuss why environmental sensitivity to early life stress may have evolved in the first place. Finally, I will discuss the potential role of historical trauma in shaping contemporary inequities in health. The results of this work have implications for our understanding of how and why the social gradient in health has emerged.

[note: there is no video recording available for this presentation]

Tyler Marghetis - A history of our times
2020-10-26 12:00 - 13:30
A history of our times
Tyler Marghetis
Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced & Omidyar Fellow, The Santa Fe Institute
This is a talk about Time. I start with the tension between, on the one hand, the global diversity in how people conceive of time, and on the other, the sense of stability—even necessity—that we often assign to our own idiosyncratic conceptions. I then argue as follows. First, conceptualizations of time are best understood, not as concepts within individual brains, but as heterogeneous systems distributed across brains, bodies, material artifacts, and cultural practices—that is, as “cognitive ecologies.” Second, within a cognitive ecology, mutual dependence is the rule rather than the exception. Third, since cognitive ecologies consist of such varied components as neural circuits and Twitter timelines, these ecologies exhibit change on multiple, nested timescales—timescales that range from the slow evolution by natural selection of innate biases in our brains and bodies, to the cultural evolution of language and other artifacts, to the rapid pace of situated interaction. Fourth, these considerations explain the patterns in cross-cultural diversity, the stability of conceptions within communities, and the ways in which conceptions do, and do not, change over time. This argument is intended to be generic and to apply equally to our conceptions of other domains. I conclude that our conceptions of time—and number, and space—only make sense in light of their histories.

Nadya Vasilyeva - Structural thinking about social categories
2020-10-19 12:00 - 13:30
Structural thinking about social categories
Nadya Vasilyeva
Postdoctoral Scholar, Geography of Philosophy Project, UCLA Department of Anthropology
Categorical reasoning is one of the cornerstones of psychological functioning, supporting explanation, induction, and learning in virtually every domain of knowledge, including reasoning about social categories. Dominant theories of social cognition focus on the role of internal/essential characteristics in representations of social kinds. Drawing upon an emerging literature in philosophy, I introduce an alternative to internalist thinking, called “structural thinking”, in which observed correlations between social categories and their properties are explained through stable external constraints, rather than derived from the inherent nature of the categories. For example, a structural explanation of why girls wear pink might appeal to the socio-cultural pressures that affect choices and their social consequences, as opposed to inherent color preferences. I will present a series of studies which trace the developmental trajectory of structural thinking from age three through adulthood, and establish it as a distinct, early-emerging mode of thought with a unique cognitive, linguistic and behavioral profile. Recognizing structural reasoning invites us to rethink theories of categorical representation both within and beyond the social domain.

Heidi Colleran - Rethinking reproduction in human evolutionary research
2020-10-12 12:00 - 13:30
Rethinking reproduction in human evolutionary research
Heidi Colleran
BirthRites Independent Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
In this talk I would like to critique and try to reframe the way that evolutionary researchers approach human reproductive behavior. Master narratives of human evolution have long promoted a naturalized, eco- logically determinist account of reproductive decision-making: these are usually narrowly tied to resource acquisition and to the energetics of re- production. Concepts like ‘natural fertility’ raise more problems than they address. Problematic dichotomies between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ so- cieties are often based on the number of children people have, or on how individually ‘calculated’ reproductive decisions are, or on the use of so- called ‘modern’ contraceptives, all of which obscure how central cultural dynamics are to reproduction. Tacitly assuming reproduction is a private or a domestic activity, generally limited to women, also neglects the fact that it is often a public and a political domain. These conceptual slip- pages and shorthands can make the cultural influences on reproduction invisible, in both the past and the present. Drawing on my own research on the dynamics of fertility decline as well as on broader work in cul- tural evolution, cultural anthropology and anthropological demography, I would like to reframe reproduction as a central activity around which culture and demography co-evolve.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
