We cordially invite you to the next lecture of
the BME Cognitive Seminar Series:
Date & Time: April 15, Monday, 12:00-13:00
Location: BME, XI., Egry
József utca 1., T. ép 515.
Cold-blooded
social cognition
Anna Kis
Research Centre
for Natural Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and
Psychology, Hungarian
Academy of Sciences
Department of Ethology, Eötvös
University,
Budapest,
Hungary
Abstract
The evolution of
highly developed sociality is often cited as one of the main
behavioural characteristics that differentiate us from non-human
animals. Thus one principal aim of comparative cognition research
is to shed light to uniquely human socio-cognitive skills in
contrast to those ones that are shared with other species. Here I
will briefly present the main approaches to comparative cognition
and then focus on those basic social behaviours that are shared by
humans and low-level vertebrates – reptiles. It is a wide spread
notion that reptiles are non-social animals, although ample
evidence has been gathered from field investigations that
contradicts this assumption. I will present some of the more
recent studies demonstrating that reptiles are able to follow the
gaze of a conspecific and that they spontaneously learn from a
social demonstration in various contexts including the two-action
task. These results indicate that several socio-cognitive
abilities are likely based on evolutionarily ancient mechanisms.
--
Attila Keresztes
Junior Research Fellow
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Dept. of Cognitive Science,
Egry József u. 1, Budapest
1111, Hungary
Tel: +36 1 4633525