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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
