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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]