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 […]
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 […]
Simone Schnall: University of CambridgeTraditional theories of perception have assumed that visual processing is not influenced by top-down cognitive processes and is thus driven entirely by physical properties of the environment (Pylyshyn, 1984). For example, how a person sees stimuli such as a cup of coffee or a steep hill was thought to be only […]
Thom Scott-Phillips: Durham UniversityLanguage is arguably humanity's most distinctive characteristic. What, exactly, is language, and why are we the only species that has it? In this talk, based upon my recent book*, I will argue that the differences between human communication and the communication systems of all other species is probably not a difference of […]
Gregory Clark: UC DavisMost work studying the inheritance of aspects of social status across societies suggests two things. The first is that this inheritance is weak. Most social status for people is not determined by inheritance from parents. The second is that the strength of inheritance of status varies markedly across societies, so that status […]
Henrike Moll: USCHumans are an extraordinarily social species. Their unique way of relating to one another becomes evident very early in ontogeny. In this talk, I will present two lines of experiments, both of which exemplify toddlers’ attunement to other persons and their awareness of others’ perceptual and epistemic states. In one line of experiments, […]
David Funder: UC RiversideBehavior is a function of the person and the situation, and understanding the "personality triad" of persons, situations and behaviors requires assessment instruments for all three. However, until recently tools for assessing situations were not available. The Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) was developed to fill this gap, and has been applied in […]
Federico Rossano: Max Plank InstituteSocial theorists as diverse as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Marx have suggested that without the institution of property modern civil society would not exist. All human societies care about ownership of at least some kinds of things (Brown, 1991; Hann, 1998), yet young children struggle to understand property and come only […]
Corina Logan: UCSBNew Caledonian crows are one of the few species that make and use tools in the wild. Tool types differ across their range in an overlapping pattern, suggesting that tool designs are copied with a high fidelity and may be transmitted across generations, thus allowing for cumulative changes to occur to the lineage […]
Ben Trumble: UCSBIn February 2014, catastrophic flooding impacted the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Flooding decimated the subsistence lifestyle and more than two-thirds of villages were flooded (completely destroying crops and washing away most possessions); thousands fled to the nearby market town of San Borja. Widespread food insecurity and disease followed. This project examines the […]
