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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]