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Chris Kelty & Jessica Lynch – Pouncing on opportunities: domestic/feral cat biology and global human-mediated cat niche expansion

Why are cats everywhere? Grounded on research into the controversy around feral or community cats and 'TNR' (Trap, Neuter, Return) in Los Angeles, we posit that the modern domestic/feral cat has demonstrated abilities toward multidimensional "niche expansion" and "niche space saturation" that allow it to succeed and increase in population density through behavioral diversification, where […]

Helen Davis – Culture, Cultural Change, and Cognitive Development

What does cognitive development look like in a world without schools or formally educated parents or communities? What if our most fundamental measures of cognitive performance were influenced by small amounts of schooling or by having parents, siblings or others who attended schools in one’s household or community? Growing evidence suggests that the human mind […]

Federico Rossano – Interacting like a human being: a developmental and comparative perspective on calibrating requests

In his paper on the “human interaction engine”, Levinson famously asserted that, in social interaction, people’s responses “are to actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006: 45). Indeed human beings attribute intentions/goals to the production of signals and parsing other’s signals means simulating others’ mental worlds, at least to some degree.  But how do speakers calibrate their […]

Lisa O’Bryan – Communication and the Coordination of Collective Behavior in Non-human and Human Social Groups

Lisa O'Bryan, Rice University In order to obtain social benefits, individuals must remain cohesive, coordinate their behavior, and collectively process information. The field of collective behavior focuses on understanding how group-wide properties such as these emerge from the interactions of many individuals. Most studies of collective behavior examine how coordination is achieved through visual cues […]

Kelsey McCune – Space Use, Exploratory Behavior and Rapid Range Expansion in Great-Tailed Grackles

Humans are rapidly changing the natural world, leading to decreasing native fauna and increasing non-native fauna.  Problematic species range expansions are occurring across the globe, but not all species are able to become established outside of their original range.  It is still unclear which characteristics facilitate successful invasions or native species persistence in human-modified environments.  […]

James Higham – Insights into Life-History from the Cayo Santiago Rhesus Macaques

We humans come from a diverse order, the primates, which make excellent model systems for studying the interface between the biological and the social. In this talk, I focus on our long-running field studies of the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Decades of individual-based demographic data allow us to explore variation in life […]

Luke Premo – How Cultural Evolutionary Forces Affect Regional Variation in Structured Populations and the Archaeological Assemblages They Leave Behind

Paleolithic archaeologists have employed expectations generated from models developed in evolutionary anthropology to aid in the investigation of the origins of high-fidelity cultural transmission. Based on the notion that copying error ought to yield high levels of between-group cultural variation under unbiased cultural transmission, archaeologists have interpreted ostensibly “lower-than-expected” levels of cultural variation among regional […]

Sasha Kimel – Meatborne Xenophobia: Understanding When Disgust Fuels Outgroup Hate

Given that animal-borne pathogens pose especially high disease risks and, moreover, that a growing body of research suggests that the evolved function of disgust is the avoidance of disease, it is largely unsurprising that the consumption of non-normative meat would evoke strong disgust reactions. Yet, it is largely unclear whether and when concerns about disease […]

Jaimie Krems – Tackling Friendship: Appraising, Finding, Getting, and Keeping Partners

Friends have recurrently provided social, material, and emotional support—helping humans meet a range of recurrent challenges tributary to fitness. But friendships are not the first type of relationship that comes to mind when thinking about research in social psychology or evolutionary social science. Moreover, when friendships are the focus, work typically foregrounds the friendship dyad. […]