At Face Value: The Role of Chimpanzee Facial Expressivity in the Evolution of Gestural Communication and Social Bonding Britt Florkiewicz UCLA Department of Anthropology Primates make frequent use of visual signals when communicating with conspecifics, which includes facial expressions and gestures. These two forms of visual communication are thought to be different from one another: […]

Socio-cognitive mechanisms of fairness Nadia Chernyak UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences One of the most critical societal issues is our perpetuation of inequality. One important quandary, however, is that humans agree that equality is important, but continue to endorse and perpetuate existing inequalities. This talk presents some developmental evidence for why this may be […]

Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists Oliver Sng Department of Psychological Science, UC Irvine Individuals have evolved to adaptively allocate energy across different life tasks, such as mating effort, parenting effort, and building embodied capital. From various theoretical perspectives (e.g., parental investment theory, life history theory), an individual’s biological sex, current life stage, and […]

How to Know Celeste Kidd Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley This talk will discuss Kidd’s research about how people come to know what they know. The world is a sea of information too vast for any one person to acquire entirely. How then do people navigate the information overload, and how do their decisions shape […]

Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies Sheina Lew-Levy Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University & Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University Studying how contemporary hunter-gatherer children learn to forage can help shed light on the evolution of human cognition, life history, and social organization. Still, our species’ developmental plasticity and socioecological diversity complicates […]