Ruth Mace: University College London Department of AnthropologyA behavioural ecological approach to human birth rates suggests they should vary according to the costs of raising children to adulthood. Demographers and most other social scientists are sceptical of this view, not least because birth rates are generally lowest in the wealthiest countries; most favour arguments based […]
Devesh Rustagi: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich - Department of Environmental Policy and EconomicsRecent research suggests that the power of conditional cooperation norm and punishment of norm violators in sustaining cooperation depends on behavioral type composition of a group, which has been shown, experimentally, to have a predictive effect on cooperation outcome. However, because […]
Aaron Sell: UCSB Department of PsychologyAnger can be understood as a cognitive mechanism designed by natural selection to negotiate conflicts of interest in ways similar to, but distinct from, non-human animal conflict. The Recalibrational Theory of anger uses an evolutionary biological framework to predict the major features of anger and explain their computational structure by […]
Greg Hickok: UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences & Center for Cognitive NeuroscienceThere are two ideas regarding how auditory and motor speech systems interact in language processing. A popular view in the neuroscience community is that motor systems play an important role in the perception of speech. This is an old idea that has been largely (if […]
Bruce Bridgeman: UC Santa Cruz Department of PsychologyEstimation of slope is an everyday tool for navigating the external world. Previous studies have found that slopes are overestimated more greatly with a verbal than with a proprioceptive measure. Since some neurons in the premotor cortex respond differently to objects within arm’s reach, we hypothesized that slope […]
Steve Frank: UC Irvine & Santa Fe Institute Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyCurrent studies of biological sociality tend to ignore two key factors: the consequences of social traits on long-term aspects of survival and fecundity (demography), and the tension between short and long time scales of success. I use several examples from the biology […]
Steve Frank: UC Irvine & Santa Fe Institute Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyCurrent studies of biological sociality tend to ignore two key factors: the consequences of social traits on long-term aspects of survival and fecundity (demography), and the tension between short and long time scales of success. I use several examples from the biology […]
Andrew Shaner: UCLA Semel Institute for Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences; Deputy Chief of Psychiatry and Mental Health, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare SystemIn many species, siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that […]
Steve Neuberg: Arizona State University Department of PsychologyTraditional psychological and social science theories fail to account for the complexity and nuance that characterize people's prejudices and the manner in which, more generally, people view and interact with one another. I am developing an alternative, functional, affordance-based model, one positing (1) that our views of others […]
Katerina Semendeferi: UCSD Department of AnthropologyThe organ of the mind, the brain, is the focus of several fields of study. This lecture will address the role of neuroanatomy in reconstructions of cognitive evolution. It will present new data on the internal organization of the brain of humans and great apes and will revisit, in a […]
