Debra Lieberman: U of Hawaii PsychologyMechanisms for detecting kin rely on cues that correlated with relatedness in ancestral environments to adaptively regulate mate selection and altruistic effort. For siblings, one potential cue, proposed by Edward Westermarck, is co-residence duration. Another cue that would have been highly predictive of siblingship is seeing one's mother caring for […]
Peter Todd: U of Indiana Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain SciencesThe choice of a mate is not only one of the most important decisions in our lives, but also one of the most difficult, fraught by lack of knowledge of the options to come and inability to return to options already passed by. […]
Katie Hinde: UCLA AnthropologyLactation represents the greatest post-natal cost of mothering in primates and numerous studies have established that variation in maternal condition is associated with infant growth, development, health, and survival. Presumably the effects of maternal condition are mediated through milk output during lactation, however this relationship remains poorly understood. Here I present the […]
Gyorgy Gergely: Central European University, Budapest, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral SciencesHuman minds construct cultural products that form part of the environmental niche to which new generations of human minds must adapt. A remarkable feature of cultural transmission is that infants fast-learn a vast amount of cultural skills very early on even when […]
Brian Skyrms: UC Irvine Department of Logic & Philosophy of ScienceSender-Receiver games are simple, tractable models of information transmission. They provide a basic setting for the study the evolution of meaning. It is possible to investigate not only the equilibrium structure of these games, but also the dynamics of evolution and learning – with sometimes […]
Russell Jackson: CSU San Marcos Department of PsychologyDistance perception is among the most ubiquitous psychological phenomena known. Humans utilize distance estimation during all waking hours and even when sleeping. Distance perception likely takes place to this same extent in most other animals and distance perception also occurs in many non-animal species. Furthermore, distance perception is […]
Jessica Lynch Alfaro: UCLA Center for Society and GeneticsDespite growing interest in capuchin monkeys as model organisms for social learning and cultural evolution, comparative evolutionary study of Cebus behavioral traits across field sites and species have been impeded by the lack of a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for the group. Here I present the first molecular […]
Gary Charness: UC Santa Barbara Department of EconomicsWe conducted three field experiments to investigate how people schedule and complete tasks, providing some of the first data concerning procrastination and willpower under financial incentives. In our first study, we paid students $95 if they completed 75 hours of monitored studying over a five-week period. We also […]
Brooke Scelza: UCLA Department of AnthropologyAustralian Aborigines in the Western Desert have gone through a nutritional transition in the last 50 years; moving from a diet of mainly indigenous “bush foods†acquired during daily foraging trips to one that includes store-bought products delivered directly to community shops. Although store-bought foods are more convenient, their availability […]
John Alcock: Arizona State University Department of Life SciencesI will review why I became an adaptationist and continue to believe that the theory of natural selection as amended by W.D. Hamilton supplies us with all we need in order to understand all aspects of animal behavior, including that of our own species. I will examine […]
