Tim German: UCSB PsychologyThe human ability to make tools and use them to solve problems may not be zoologically unique, but it is certainly extraordinary. Yet little is known about the conceptual machinery that makes humans so competent at making and using tools. Do adults and children have concepts specialized for understanding human-made artifacts? If […]
Ann Senghas: Barnard College of Columbia University, Dept. of PsychologyThe recent emergence of a new sign language among deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua provides an opportunity to study how linguistic features of a language arise and spread. New features that arise must be successfully transmitted from one generation to the next to survive as […]
Trent Smith: UCLA International InstituteThe economic theory of "rational addiction" posits that drug addiction can usefully be viewed as the outcome of an informed decision undertaken on the part of the consumer. I employ a complementary approach to developing a behavioral theory of addiction by identifying circumstances under which addiction-like behavior is the solution to […]
Michael Rose: UC Irvine Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary BiologyHuman behavior is unlike that of all other known animal behavior in its high degree of flexibility and versatility. A problem that is given less attention than it deserves is that flexible behavior is difficult to explain in Darwinian terms. "Free will" poses a challenge to […]
Olav Sorenson: UCLA Anderson School of ManagementStudies have consistently found that social structure influences who transacts with whom, and that actors appear to benefit when exchange occurs embedded within these relations rather than in an unstructured market. Explanations for these results frequently point to their effectiveness in solving problems inherent in the trade of certain […]
Patricia Churchland: UCSD Dept. of PhilosophyAlthough questions concerning the nature of free choice have long been at the center of philosophical reflection, new discoveries, especially from neuropharmacology and neuropsychology, have lent them a special and very practical urgency. In the courts, in the education of children, and in general in daily life, we assume that […]
Gary Marcus: NYU Dept. of PsychologyTwo of the most central questions in understanding the nature of the uniquely human talent for language are the extent to which the underlying neural machinery is "innate" (or "built-in"), and the extent to which that machinery is specialized for language as opposed to other cognitive functions. In this talk, […]
Jerome Siegel: UCLA Dept. of PsychiatrySleep amounts vary by more than an order of magnitude across mammalian species. Either the amount of time spent sleeping has no relation to underlying function, which would distinguish sleep from many other homeostatically regulated processes, or sleep need varies considerably across species. Prior data and new data on primitive […]
Chris Boehm: USC Dept. of AnthropologyChimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers are taken as models which help to explain our troubled world of nations, which in many ways is like a chimpanzee community with dominant alpha nations that throw their weight around---but in others is like a hunter-gatherer band, in which the group sees to it that […]
Aimee Plourde: UCLA Dept. of AnthropologyThe emergence of social ranking and political hierarchy in human society constituted a fundamental departure from the small, egalitarian group structure thought to characterize society for most of our species’ history. Explaining the origins of social ranking is thus key to understanding the underlying structures of modern human societies, and […]
