Andrew Whalen: University of EdinburghSocial learning and asocial learning are sometimes seen as two conflicting ways in which individuals make decisions and learn about the world around them. Increasingly research has found that instead of being two conflicting learning processes, individuals, including children, will combine social and asocial sources of information to make decisions. One […]

Barney Schlinger: UCLAManakins are a clade of extraordinary neotropical birds. In many species, the brightly–colored males are polygynous, performing no parental care duties, but they gather into leks for courtship. Over the past 20 years, my lab has performed detailed behavioral studies of golden-collared manakins (Manacus vitellinus) of Panamanian rainforests. These males clear display courts […]

Dan Conroy-Beam: UC Santa BarbaraHuman mating research is largely motivated by an assumption that mate choice is guided by mate preferences. But the field knows little about the psychology responsible for translating preferences into downstream outcomes. Stated differently, what do mate preferences do and how do they do it? I present data from a series […]

Ian C. Gilby: Arizona State UniversityIn order to understand the causes and consequences of the significant increase in meat consumption in hominins, we must first make inferences about the behavior of the last common ancestor (LCA) of apes and humans. Chimpanzees, which regularly hunt vertebrates, are a valuable point of reference for understanding the possible […]

Noa Pinter-Wollman: UCLAMany biological systems are aggregates of individuals working synergistically to achieve collective goals. In social insects, evolution acts on variation in the emergent collective behaviors of the colony. Variation among colonies in collective behavior can result from differences in their composition and/or from differences in the environments in which they reside. To understand […]