Gregory F. Grether: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyNormal development depends on specific environmental inputs. Consequently, when a species encounters novel environmental conditions, some traits may develop abnormally. Changes in the environment can occur, for example, because of climate change or habitat degradation. Like genetic mutations, most environmental perturbations of development are detrimental, and […]

Craig McKenzie: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyFraming effects are said to occur when "equivalent" redescriptions of objects or outcomes lead to different preferences or judgments. For example, a medical treatment is seen more favorably when described as resulting in "90% survival" rather than "10% mortality." Such effects are widely considered to be classic violations […]

Dan Posner: UCLA Department of Political Science

Steven Gaulin: UCSB Department of AnthropologyThough Silverman and Eals division-of-foraging-labor hypothesis cannot explain the cross-species distribution of sex differences in spatial ability, it does make a novel prediction: women will more accurately remember the location of stationary resources. Unfortunately, Silverman and Eals’ own tests of this hypothesis have yielded weak and inconsistent support, possibly because […]

Rafael Nuñez: UCSD Department of Cognitive ScienceHow can we "objectively" share abstract entities with others, in a stable and consistent way? How can we evaluate "Truth" when purely imaginary entities are concerned? Mathematics provides a very intriguing case for studying these questions. Indeed, mathematics, on the one hand deals with purely imaginary entities (e.g., a […]

Gail Heyman: UCSD Department of PsychologyThe human capacity to acquire knowledge from others, rather than only relying upon what can be observed or experienced directly, opens vast opportunities for learning. As a result of this capacity, humans are highly adaptable across many contexts. However, the use of such information can also pose difficulties. For example, […]

John Patton: California State University Fullerton Department of AnthropologyThe search for solutions to the conundrum of altruism is a central focus of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The focus of this talk is to present data on cooperation collected among horticultural foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon to argue that a better understanding […]

Teresa Seeman : UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Division of GeriatricsDr. Seeman will discuss evidence linking socio-economic, social and psychological resources to trajectories of health and aging and the multiple biological pathways through which these factors appear to impact on health outcomes over the life course. Possible sex and/or ethnic differences in these patterns […]

Leeat Yariv: Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, UCLA Department of EconomicsIn this talk, I will briefly survey the existing literature on social learning and conformity (both theoretical and experimental) and then present evidence from an array of new experiments disentangling conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from informational herding in a sequential […]

Terrence Deacon: UC Berkeley Department of AnthropologyAlthough biologists have long recognized examples of regressive processes in evolution as well as a role for regressive processes in the development of brains, research interest tends to focus on presumably constructive and progressive processes under the influence of natural selection. Particularly in the case of human brains and […]