Andy Sih - Three Frontiers in the Study of Behavioural Syndromes (aka Animal Personalities)
2013-11-25 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Andy Sih: UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy Over the past decade, a rapidly growing number of studies have shown that animals often exhibit personalities; e.g., where some individuals are consistently more aggressive, bold, active, exploratory or social than others. Here, I present theory, data and ideas on three ‘frontiers’ in the study of the ecological and evolutionary implications of this phenomenon. First, I discuss a theoretical/conceptual framework for explaining variation in the phenomenon. Why are individuals sometimes very consistent (stable) in their personality, but other times, less so? When do we expect early experiences to have large effects on later personality, versus when do we expect little or no lasting effect of early experiences? Second, I examine the interaction between individual behavioural types (BTs) and the social situation in determining individual behaviours and fitness outcomes (mating success). This section raises issues about group selection on personalities, keystone individuals, social skill and rapidly reversible mating systems. Finally, I present data and ideas on a key ecological implication of behavioural syndromes – the effect of behavioural type dependent dispersal on ecological invasions and spatial ecology, in general.

Jay Belsky - Childhood Experience and the Development of Reproductive Strategies: An Evolutionary Theory of Socialization Revisited
2013-12-02 00:00
Jay Belsky: UC Davis Department of Human Ecology, Human Development and Family Studies Program An evolutionary biological perspective on the effects of the extra-familial and familial environment on multiple psychological, behavioral and even somatic features of children’s development challenges prevailing thinking about human development which regards some contextual conditions and their sequelae as “good” and others as “bad”. Theory and research on the development of human reproductive strategies based on such evolutionary thinking has developed substantially over the past two decades. Here I review two decades of theory development and research findings pertaining to the development of reproductive strategies, highlighting the contextual regulation of pubertal timing, the distinctive role of father, differential susceptibility to rearing influences, mechanisms of influence and new ways of conceptualizing the environment, while outlining future directions for research.

Pamela Smith - The Social Distance Theory of Power
2014-01-06 00:00
Pamela Smith: UC San Diego Rady School of Management, Professor of Management and Strategy I propose that individuals with higher power should view the world in a more high-level, abstract fashion than individuals with lower power (Magee & Smith, 2013). As having power makes individuals less dependent on others (relative to lacking power), it increases the psychological distance one feels from others, and this distance (according to construal level theory) should lead to more abstract information processing. Thus, those with power think in terms of the “big picture,” focusing more on primary, goal-relevant aspects of stimuli and moving beyond the details to see patterns and structure, than those without power. In my talk I will review several studies that demonstrate this effect. Then I will discuss more recent research that has explored the intrapersonal and interpersonal implications of these effects for domains such as perceived power, forgiveness, and executive functioning.

Paul Rozin - Reflections on Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology
2014-01-09 00:00
Paul Rozin: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology None Available

Robert Watson - Conservatism and Creativity in Cultural Evolution: A View from the Arts and Humanities
2014-01-13 00:00
Robert Watson: UCLA Department of English Creative arts and humanistic learning allow us to vary, evaluate, and regulate the evolving cultural systems that we empower, at some cost and risk, to protect us from the unique openness of human consciousness. Culture takes over the conservative tasks (performed biochemically in most non-human creatures) of giving shape to the overwhelming data offered by the world and providing coherent instructions for responding. Yet high culture (both artistic and scholarly) helps the broader culture co-evolve with us, offering a safe setting for experimental innovations, selecting which latent parts of our epigenetic library should be activated in a particular environment, and favoring variations that promote long-term diversity over self-serving viruses that commandeer the body-politic into narrowing, inhumane projects. Universities provide an essential defense both against the reactionary tribalism that resents complexity and multiculturalism, and against the runaway meme-complexes now often manifest in capitalism and religion.

Dario Maestripieri - Understanding human life history variation: sleep patterns, personality traits, relationship status, and hormones.
2014-01-23 00:00
Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Human Development; Institute for Mind and BiologySeveral lines of evidence suggest that eveningness is associated with traits that favor short-term mating such as higher extraversion, novelty-seeking, risk-taking, and short-term relationship orientation in both males and females. Night owl men also report a higher number of sexual partners than early-morning men, who instead, show personality and behavioral traits typically associated with slow life histories. Evidence also exists that autistic-like and schizotypal personality traits reflect opposite sides of a continuum of variation in personality and cognition that are best understood in reference to other slow and fast life history adaptations. Cortisol and testosterone may be some the physiological mechanisms underlying psychological and behavioral traits associated with slow and fast life histories. Both cortisol and testosterone levels differ between individuals who are single and in relationships, with cortisol being associated with some aspects of personality and stress, while men’s testosterone is more directly linked to variation in courtship activity and sexual promiscuity.

Thomas Plummer - Oldowan Archeology on the Homa Peninsula, Kenya, or what 2 million year old trash tells us about hominin behavior
2014-01-27 00:00
Thomas Plummer: Queens College Department of Anthropology, member of CUNY graduate faculty and New York Consortium in Evolutionary PrimatologyHumans are odd primates. We have unusually large brains, a diet rich in hard-to-acquire, nutrient dense foods, we practice extensive food sharing, and we can adapt to a broad panorama of environments through cultural practices and social institutions. Whereas other primates may exhibit culture, and produce technologies that assist in foraging, humans are unique in being dependent on cultural practices for survival. But how far back in time does this dependency on culture go? What was the adaptive significance of early stone technologies? In this talk I will describe research on two million year old archeological sites on the Homa Peninsula, Kenya. This research sheds light on early hominin foraging ecology at the dawn of the genus Homo.

Jacinta Beehner - Changes in female reproductive condition following the arrival of new males in geladas: A physiological trifecta?
2014-01-31 00:00
Jacinta Beehner: University of Michigan Department of Anthropology The arrival of a new dominant male can be a tumultuous time for females in a primate social group – particularly when this male is likely to be infanticidal. Females of many taxa where infanticide occurs have developed counterstrategies to this threat. In sharp contrast with the behavioral counterstrategies reported for many primate species, we discovered that female gelada responses are almost entirely physiological. Using 7 years of demographic and hormonal data from a population of wild geladas living in the Simien Mountains National Park, Ethiopia, I will detail two of these strategies – “false fertility” employed by lactating females, and pregnancy termination (a “Bruce effect”) employed by pregnant females. Completing the trifecta, I will present preliminary data that adolescent females exhibit yet a third physiological response to the arrival of a new male – the sudden onset of maturation (a “Vandenbergh effect”). I revive a term previously proposed for these same effects (the “hoo haa effect”) because there is likely a singular mechanism mediating all three outcomes.

Kirk Lohmueller - Discovering Recent Human History and Natural Selection from Genetic Variation Data
2014-02-10 00:00
Kirk Lohmueller: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyIt is commonly quoted that any two humans are identical at 99.9% of their three billion DNA letters. However, this statement also means that there are roughly three million positions where any two genomes are different. Many such variants have been accumulating throughout hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and provide a record of human history. Additionally, many of these variants acting together will affect how many children an individual will have or may contribute to the risk of common diseases. Here I will describe two projects aimed at learning about human history and natural selection from genetic variation data. First, through the analysis of genetic variation in the coding regions of genes obtained from 1500 Han Chinese and Danish individuals, I find evidence for extreme, recent, population growth in both populations. However, this growth appears to have been greater in the Han Chinese than in the Danes. The second project is based on the analysis of genetic diversity on the human Y chromosome. We find that genetic diversity is substantially lower than expected on this chromosome. Sex-biased demographic processes throughout human history cannot, by themselves, explain this reduction in genetic diversity. Rather, natural selection removing deleterious mutations from nearly 4Mb of the Y chromosome, or natural selection increasing the frequency of beneficial mutations is required to explain the data.

Morteza Dehghani - #morality in 140 Characters: Examining Moral Rhetoric in Text
2014-02-24 00:00
Morteza Dehghani: USC Brain and Creativity Institute, ARTIS Research FellowThe availability of vast and seemingly insurmountable volumes of human-related data has provided an unprecedented opportunity to study human cognition with range and detail previously not imaginable. An enormous amount of such data, however, is in the form of human generated text, and cannot be analyzed directly. As a result, there has been rapid developments in automated text analysis methods focused on measuring psychological and demographic properties. In this talk, I will present a computational text analysis technique for tracking and measuring transformations in moral concerns with regards to different social-cultural issues, and for examining the moral dimensions of different debates using text. This technique uses Latent Semantic Analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts of interest and moral keywords taken from the Moral Foundation Dictionary (Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009). I will specifically focus on analyzing Twitter data regarding the 2013 federal government shutdown. Our results demonstrate that using moral loadings of tweets we can make various accurate predictions about Twitter users and communities.

Megan Robbins - The Little Things in Life: An Observational Perspective on Everyday Coping
2014-03-03 00:00
Megan Robbins: UC Riverside Department of Psychology This talk discusses the potential of a novel naturalistic observation method, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), for studying health-relevant social processes. The EAR is a portable audio recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds from participants’ momentary environments. In tracking moment-to-moment ambient sounds, it yields acoustic logs of people’s days as they naturally unfold. In sampling only a fraction of the time, it protects participants’ privacy and makes large-scale observational studies feasible. As a naturalistic observation method, the EAR provides an observer’s account of daily life, which renders it optimal for studying the role of automatic expressive behaviors (e.g. sighing, swearing, laughing) and habitual communication processes (e.g. we-talk) in the coping context. I will first highlight findings regarding the role of sighing, swearing, and laughing in the coping process. Then, I will present recent results from a study of the daily social interactions of couples coping with breast cancer.

Peter Todd - Domain-specific mechanisms for decisions about food
2014-03-10 00:00
Peter Todd: Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences The need to find nourishing foods is a selective pressure that may have shaped many human cognitive processes, from perception to memory. In this talk, I present some of our efforts to uncover such domain-specific influences. Hurlbert and Ling (2007) suggested that an ancestral sexual division of labor, with foraging females seeking out ripe fruits, could have led to a cross-cultural female preference for red hues. We have developed a novel approach to studies of sex differences and culture differences in color preference by analyzing the hue distributions of a large database of over 20 million color photographs on Flickr taken by men and women. While we find a general red-hue preference among women across cultures, we cannot attribute it to food-based images. In another study, we have found top-down influences of hunger on perceptual categorizations of edible versus non-edible items. Finally, we have been testing whether memory for recently eaten foods may be designed to let individuals track and respond to items that make them sick, leading to a forgetting pattern different from the usual decelerating decay seen in other domains.

Fei Xu - Towards a rational constructivist approach to cognitive development
2014-03-31 00:00
Fei Xu: UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, Infant Cognition and Language LabThe study of cognitive development has often been framed in terms of the nativist/empiricist debate. Here I present a new approach to cognitive development: rational constructivism. I will argue that learners take into account both prior knowledge and biases (learned or unlearned) as well as statistical information in the input; prior knowledge and statistical information are combined in a rational manner (captured by Bayesian probabilistic models); and there exists a set of domain-general learning mechanisms that give rise to domain-specific knowledge. Furthermore, learners actively engage in gathering data from their environment. I will present evidence supporting the idea that early learning is rational, statistical, and inferential, and infants and young children are rational, constructivist learners.

Christopher Schmitt - The genomics of obesogenic growth during development and adult-onset obesity in captive vervet monkeys: Preliminary results and potential for studies in the wild
2014-04-07 00:00
Christopher Schmitt: UCLA Center for Nuerobehavioral Genetics Obesity is increasingly prevalent worldwide, and has severe negative impacts on public health. Obesity arises from a complex interaction of genetic predisposition and environment that can accumulate throughout life. Although increasing evidence points to the importance of early development in the manifestations of adult disease, few studies have been undertaken of developmental measures that might be associated with adult obesity risk. The search for obesogenic markers during development in humans is complicated by the ubiquity of diets high in fat and simple carbohydrates, and the difficulty in assessing the actual diets of study subjects. This research investigates the genetic underpinnings of adult onset obesity and obesogenic growth trajectories from birth to adulthood in a genetically well-characterized model system under a controlled diet and environment: the African green monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops sabaeus) in the Vervet Research Colony at Wake Forest University.
We currently have some power to identify SNPs associated with these obesogenic traits, but the sample size must be increased. With further sampling, a more detailed examination of growth trajectories, in combination with novel biomarkers such as the SNPs discovered in this study, may be used to assess early obesity risks and promote the discovery of novel biomedical interventions. Perhaps of more interest to evolutionary anthropologists, the results of this captive study could easily be extended to wild populations. Our research group has already sequenced the genomes of hundreds of vervet monkeys from across their ancestral ranges in Africa, and in an isolated wild population on the islands of St. Kitts & Nevis in the Caribbean. This research raises the exciting possibility of assessing phenotypic plasticity and environmental impacts on trait expression in the wild associated with SNPs that are obesogenic in captivity.

Josh Tasoff - A Biotic Economics Framework for Microbial Trade
2014-04-21 00:00
Josh Tasoff: Claremont Graduate University School of Politics and EconomicsA significant fraction of all life in the biosphere exists in complex communities in which crossfeeding is essential. In the same way that firms and consumers exchange a vast array of goods in modern markets, organisms exchange essential resources to promote their growth. Here, we present a framework based on general equilibrium theory from economics to predict the population dynamics of crossfeeding microbial communities. Analysis of a special case of the model involving two crossfeeding microbes yields several novel insights: (1) the economic concept of comparative advantage is a crucial condition for trade-based mutualism between species, (2) species that contribute more resources increase their growth rate but at the expense of a lower share of the total population, and (3) the inability to produce essential metabolites (i.e. auxotrophy) can be a selective advantage that explains its prevalence in microbial ecosystems. To test our model experimentally, we construct a synthetic syntrophic consortia of Escherichia coli and manipulate the cells’ ability to exchange essential amino acids. Experimental data are consistent with those generated by our model. This biotic economics framework provides a foundation to tackle key questions in microbial ecology and evolution and has useful applications to engineering synthetic ecosystems.

Jeffrey Schloss - Ecstatic Religious Rituals as Oxytocin-mediated, Hard-to-fake Signals of Cooperative Commitment?
2014-04-28 00:00
Jeffrey Schloss: Westmont College Department of Biology A prominent evolutionary account of “religious cognition” is that it emerged as a byproduct of agency detection mechanisms biased toward false positives, which were exapted as cultural innovations of moralizing gods helped stabilize cooperation by controlling defection in large-scale interactions. Although there is some empirical evidence for this account, along with the concomitant claim that religious rituals function as costly signals of commitment, if the cost of such rituals is less than their benefit, they need not function as honest signals of ascent. This talk will examine the proposal that some kinds of religious rituals associated with autonomically mediated behaviors such as blushing, shivering, fainting, and ecstatic speech, may function as hard-to-fake, though not costly, signals that both convey and promote cooperative intent. I will describe results from experiments in which human subjects engaged in a variety of religious and non-religious group activities – including Pentecostal worship – followed by participation in a series of decision tasks in standard economic games. Indices of trust, trustworthiness, generosity, and conditional responsiveness varied significantly between treatments. Measures of prosociality were correlated with the effect of group activity on plasma oxytocin. I will discuss the implications and limitations of these findings for evolutionary accounts of religion and for our understanding of ritualized group behaviors as facilitators of cooperation.

Sam Diaz-Munoz - Tiny tamarins challenge traditional perspectives on sex roles, mating systems, and the evolution of cooperation
2014-05-05 00:00
Sam Diaz-Munoz: UC Berkeley Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Integrative Biology Tamarins (Saguinus sp) are small Neotropical monkeys that, with other callitrichines, exhibit the most extensive cooperative breeding system of any non-human primate. In this presentation, I will draw on recent studies of tamarins and other callitrichines to underscore the importance of cooperative infant care to their complex social system. I review how callitrichines were originally classified as monogamous, but instead have one of the most flexible social organizations among mammals and birds. I highlight how social organization responds to different ecological conditions and how this flexibility represents a challenge to the concept of the mating system. I suggest that the cost of infant care is a main driver of atypical sexual roles, with intense female reproductive competition and extensive cooperation among males in reproductive contexts. I discuss other species that share elements of social organization with Saguinus tamarins, including humans. Given that increasing evidence points to a cooperatively breeding past for early humans, I advocate for an increasing focus on callitrichines as study systems for understanding the evolution of cooperative behavior in humans and all animal societies.

Kelly Gildersleeve - Meta-analytic and Experimental Investigations of Shifts in Women's Mate Preferences and Attractiveness across the Ovulatory Cycle
2014-05-12 00:00
Kelly Gildersleeve: UCLA Department of Psychology, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture For nearly all mammals, the high-fertility period of the ovulatory cycle is the only time when sex can lead to conception. In nonhuman species, this period is often marked by dramatic changes in females’ social interactions. I’ll present two meta-analyses and several lab experiments examining similar effects in humans. Results revealed robust support for differences between high and low fertility in women’s sexual attraction to certain characteristics in men, in some aspects of women’s social behavior (e.g., their flirtatiousness), and in their attractiveness. These findings suggest that women’s mating motivations and the responses they elicit from others are sensitive to their current fertility within the cycle, with potentially important implications for their romantic relationships and social behavior more broadly.

Stacy Rosenbaum - The development of male social partner preference in maturing mountain gorillas
2014-05-19 00:00
Stacy Rosenbaum: UCLA Department of Anthropology, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture Social relationships between adult male mountain gorillas and the infants in their groups are quite remarkable, characterized by extreme tolerance, grooming, playing, and many hours of male “babysitting.” This is true even in the 40% of groups that contain multiple adult males, where paternity certainty is low. My previous work demonstrated that 1) low-cost parenting is the most likely function of these relationships, and 2) preferences for individual male social partners persist across considerable time spans, even after social upheaval. This talk will examine the beginnings of such relationships, specifically the role maternal facilitation plays. Mothers increase their time near adult males in the first year after infants are born, and there is some evidence that they narrow their male social circle, spending more time near one preferred male than they do when infants get older. For a subsample of the population, male rank is a much better predictor of females’ choice of male social partner than either paternity or mating history. I will discuss the implications these findings have for understanding paternal kin discrimination and the evolution of intra-species variability in social structure.

Greg Bryant - The structure and functions of human laughter
2014-06-02 00:00
Greg Bryant: UCLA Department of Communication Studies, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture Laughter is a universal vocal signal ubiquitous in human social interaction and homologous to play vocalizations across several primate species. In this talk I will describe two different lines of research on the production and perception of laughter. One series of experiments examined the perception of spontaneous versus volitional laughter. Specifically, we explored relationships between particular acoustic features of laughs and judgments of how “real” they sounded, as well as a study examining the connection between spontaneous human laughter and nonhuman animal vocalizations. In another series of studies, participants across 24 societies reliably identified affiliative partners from extremely brief, decontextualized clips of recorded conversational co-laughter. Several acoustic dimensions contributed to people’s judgments of affiliation, and these results did not vary substantially across population samples. Overall, laughter is an important social vocalization with deep evolutionary roots, unique acoustic features, and a variety of possible communicative functions, both within and between groups.

Trent Smith - Evolution, Economic Insecurity, and the Modern Obesity Epidemic
2014-10-06 00:00
Trent Smith: University of OtagoWhy have obesity rates risen sharply around the world since 1980? In biological perspective, humans and other animals are thought to have evolved the ability—and the propensity—to store energy as body fat in order to survive periods of starvation. While food may be more abundant than ever today, it is becoming increasingly clear that neoliberal economic policies have been progressively shifting more and more risk onto households over the period in which body weights have risen most dramatically, and that obesity rates have risen most in countries that have pursued such policies most aggressively. A growing body of research now supports the “economic insecurity hypothesis,” which posits that uncertainty with respect to one’s material well-being may be an important root cause of the modern obesity epidemic. This lecture will review evidence supporting this hypothesis, from both the natural sciences and from econometric studies performed at the level of individuals, of demographic groups, and of countries. Implications for public policy will be discussed.http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/econ/Personal/ts_files/thumbprint.pdfhttp://www.business.otago.ac.nz/econ/Personal/ts_files/insecurity.pdfhttp://www.business.otago.ac.nz/econ/Personal/ts_files/stressdiet.pdfhttp://econpapers.repec.org/paper/agsaaea13/151419.htm

Joshua Greene - Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason & the Gap Between Us and Them
2014-10-08 00:00
Joshua Greene: Harvard UniversityIn this talk I’ll present some of the main themes in my book of the same title. First, there are two general kinds of moral problems: The original moral problem is the problem of cooperation, the “Tragedy of the Commons”—Me vs. Us. Distinctively modern moral problems are different. They involve what I call the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality,” which is about conflicting values and interests across social groups—Us vs. Them. Second, there two general kinds of moral thinking: “fast” intuitive thinking that is efficient but inflexible, and “slow” moral reasoning that is flexible but inefficient. I’ll present evidence that “fast” thinking is good for solving more basic moral problems (Me vs. Us), but that we need “slow” moral thinking to handle modern moral problems (Us vs. Them).

Carl T. Bergstrom - Dealing With Deception in Biology
2014-10-13 00:00
Carl T. Bergstrom: Washington UniversityOver the past 3.5 billion years, living organisms have evolved to acquire, store, analyze, and transmit information. This information processing capacity has allowed organisms to build up increasingly complex social organizations predicated on the effective coordination and cooperation. Coordination and cooperation in turn require honest communication among the participants in a social group. To function effectively, however, social systems need to overcome various strategic issues surrounding the threat of deception: Why do agents share information even when their interests conflict? Why don’t cheaters exploit and undermine communication by sending deceptive signals? How do communicating parties avoid eavesdropping and signal tampering? Such problems arise among the individuals within complex animal societies such as baboon troops, cooperatively nesting birds, and social insects, and also among the cells within any single multicellular organism. I argue that the threat of deception can be broken down into at least two categories: 1) cases in which the legitimate members of the social institution have some overlap in interests, but they also have individual incentives for deception, and 2) cases in which non-members of the social organization attempt to parasitize and exploit the system by subversion and other forms of trickery. We see the former category in the evolution of mate-choice signals; we see the latter in the evolution of immune strategies to deal with pathogens. I will discuss the problem of deception in biological systems, describe how these problems can be formalized using mathematical game theory, and outline some of the strategies that organisms use to overcome these problems.

Scott Wiltermuth - I’d Only Let You Down: Guilt Proneness and the Avoidance of Harmful Interdependence
2014-10-20 00:00
Scott Wiltermuth: USCFive studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt. Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those low in guilt proneness who lacked expertise in that domain to create outcome-interdependent relationships with people who possessed domain-specific expertise. Guilt proneness therefore predicts whether, and with whom, people develop interdependent relationships. The findings also demonstrate that highly-guilt prone people sacrifice financial gain out of concern about how their actions would influence others’ welfare. As such, the findings demonstrate a novel way in which guilt proneness limits free-riding and therefore reduces the incidence of potentially unethical behavior. Lastly, the findings demonstrate that people who lack competence may not always seek out competence in others when choosing partners.

Leda Cosmides - Erasing Race in California and Brazil: Racial Categorization Varies Systematically with Patterns of Alliance Across Seven Brazilian States
2014-10-27 00:00
Leda Cosmides: UC Santa BarbaraAccording to the alliance detection hypothesis, racial categorization is a (reversible) byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for detecting social alliances (Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001; Pietraszewski, Cosmides & Tooby, 2014). In southern California, showing subjects a single social interaction in which race is uncorrelated with alliance patterns produces a sharp decrease in racial categorization. But what happens in Brazil, where the social history linking race with alliance patterns is different? We conducted tests in seven Brazilian states that differ radically in their racial composition. Social class is a major dimension along which alliances are formed, and these states differ in the extent to which race predicts social class. Across states, the extent to which categorization by race decreased in response to alliance cues was highly correlated (r = .97) with the cue validity of race for predicting that targets were of the same social class as the subjects.

Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski - The Sound of Size: Human Vocal Communication of Body Size
2014-11-03 00:00
Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski: UCLABody size can have an immense impact on the biology, ecology, and social status of an animal, but so too can ones ability to advertise or assess body size. Many species communicate their size vocally. Research investigating vocal communication of physical size in mammals, including humans, has focused on two salient and largely independent features of the voice: fundamental frequency and/or corresponding harmonics (perceived as voice pitch) and formant frequencies (resonance frequencies of the supralaryngeal vocal tract). In this talk, I will discuss the degree to which fundamental and formant frequencies reliably predict variation in body size controlling for sex and age, and their relative role in the perception or accurate estimation of body size in humans. The findings that I will present corroborate work on many other mammals whose mechanisms of vocal production, including anatomical constraints on size exaggeration, parallel those of humans. However, my findings also highlight the impact of psychoacoustic, sociocultural and perceptual biases on size communication in humans.

Kiley Hamlin - Moral Babies: Preverbal Infants Know Who and What are Good and Bad
2014-11-10 00:00
Kiley Hamlin: University of British ColumbiaHow do humans come to have a “moral sense”? Are adults’ conceptions of which actions are right and which are wrong, of who is good and who is bad, who deserves praise and who deserves blame wholly the result of experiences like observing and interacting with others in one’s cultural environment and explicit teaching from parents, teachers, and religious leaders? Do all of the complexities in adult’s moral judgments reflect hard-won developmental change coupled with the emergence of advanced reasoning skills? This talk will explore evidence that, on the contrary, preverbal infants’ social preferences map surprisingly well onto adult moral intuitions. Within the first year of life, infants prefer those who help versus harm third parties, those who reward prosocial individuals and punish wrongdoers, and even privilege the intentions that drive actions over the outcomes they lead to. the second year of life, toddlers direct their own helpful actions toward helpful individuals, and harmful actions toward harmful individuals. These results suggest that our adult moral sense is supported, at least in part, by innate mechanisms for social evaluation.

Hanna Kokko - Males exist. Does it matter? -- Special Time -- 9:00am
2014-11-17 00:00
Hanna Kokko: Australian National UniversityA lot of evolutionary theory involves the concept of populations climbing towards peaks of higher fitness. Such theory has been written without taking into account that in most species there are two distinct classes of individuals — males and females — that influence the evolutionary process in a distinctly different way. I will talk about this, and try to shed some light on two quite broad questions: why do males exist, and what determines how they behave?

Nancy Dess - A Pan-Mammalian Tongue-Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis? Implications for Health and Culture
2014-11-24 00:00
Nancy Dess: Occidental CollegeIn a 2002 BEC talk, I described the working hypothesis that bittersweet taste is a marker for sensitivity to metabolic equanimity, manifested in ways ranging from responsiveness to energy balance to emotional reactivity and stress vulnerability; data from rats selectively bred on a saccharin phenotype and, to a lesser extent, humans, were presented in support of the hypothesis. This talk provides an update on our research program, including social behavior and evidence of an association between the taste phenotype and the gut microbiome. I will draw on others’ recent research with nonhuman primates (taste polymorphisms and behavioral ecology) and humans (embodied cognition) to advocate for refinement and testing of multilevel integrative models that link individual-level taste to processes at lower (gut-brain axis) and higher (sociality, culture) levels of organization.

Larry Cahill - Title: Sex Influences on Brain and Memory: The Burden of Proof has Shifted
2014-12-01 00:00
Larry Cahill: UC IrvineAbstract: Historically, neuroscience paid little if any attention to sex
influences outside a limited area of reproductive functions. But all that
is changing, and ever rapidly, with a flurry of discoveries the past 10
years in particular about sex influences on brain function down to the
molecular level. My area of emotional memory is no exception. This talk
will examine these developments, and detail how they are apparently
irreversibly, and fundamentally, altering how the NIH funds not just
neuroscience, but all of biological science.
