Dear colleagues,
I would appreciate if you could spread this announcement (pdf attached) in your group /
department / faculty / university.
Many thanks in advance,
Ludwig Huber
5 PhD Positions in Animal Cognition and Communication
In recent years, Vienna has become an important center for behavioral and cognitive
research, with a strong research focus on comparative cognitive biology. The Austrian
Science Fund (FWF) and the University of Vienna have supported this development, by
funding a multi-level, integrative PhD training programme (DK) on cognition and
communication in humans and non-human animals.
The goal is to train graduate students to understand cognition from a biological
viewpoint, with a focus on how animals solve real-world problems, such as dealing with
conspecifics in daily social life. Communication is studied as a window into social
cognition, allowing us to design experiments, which test specific hypotheses developed
through an innovative combination of field observations and experiments, and laboratory
work on humans and other animals.
The PhD positions are fully paid by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and are based at the
Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna. It includes five faculty members (T.
Bugnyar, W.T. Fitch, W. Hödl, L. Huber, K. Kotrschal) and integrates behavioral studies of
multiple aspects of cognition and communication. Although cognition research traditionally
tends to focus on mechanisms, this programme explicitly incorporates all four of
Tinbergen’s levels of analysis (phylogeny, adaptation, causation, ontogeny).
The trainees will learn to study animal and human behavior in a variety of cognitive and
ethological frameworks - focused on social cognition and communication - in both the
laboratory and in the field and will work with a diversity of model species including
amphibians (frogs, salamanders), reptiles (tortoises, lizards), birds (pigeons, corvids,
parrots), canids (wolves and dogs), humans, and nonhuman primates (squirrel monkeys,
marmosets). See the following website for more information: cogcom.univie.ac.at
Letters of application including CV, photograph, publication list, 2-3 letters of
recommendation and a statement of research interests should be sent to Mrs. Petra Pesak,
Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna,
Austria. Applications by email are particularly welcome (petra.pesak(a)univie.ac.at). The
application deadline is February 15, 2011.
The University of Vienna promotes the employment of women in fields of work in which they
are underrepresented and therefore encourages qualified women to apply to this opening.
Disabled people will be preferentially treated if qualified.
Desired qualifications
A master or an equivalent in Biology or related fields
Excellent knowledge of English as the programme language
Field experience for specific projects (e.g. on frogs)
Designing and conducting learning experiments
Demonstrated aptitude for technological skills as video-/audio recording and analyses,
computer programming, hormone analyses
Scientific interests
Animal cognition, multimodal communication, bioacoustics, learning theory, analogical
reasoning, categorization, cooperation (foraging), social hunting, behavioral and vocal
physiology, social knowledge, social learning, attachment / bonding, pattern perception,
evolution of language and music
Potential PhD Projects
Conflict Management in Corvids
Project 1/ Thomas Bugnyar:
Dealing with conflicts is a major challenge for any socially living species. Individually
based, flexibly-used skills to prevent conflicts and/or buffer their effects have been
studied almost exclusively on mammals, i.e. primates. Recent findings suggest that
patterns like third-party intervention, coalition formation, reconciliation and
consolation may be also found in captive corvids. However, it is unclear a) to what extent
different species rely on which of those strategies, b) whether or not they are based on
the same cognitive mechanisms and c) how these strategies are affected by different
degrees of fission-fusion dynamics.
The project supervised by Thomas Bugnyar shall include an observational part, focusing on
conflict management strategies of individually marked birds in wild populations of ravens
and carrion crows, and an experimental part, manipulating the context (likelihood of
aggression via distribution of resources) and the information accessible for bystanders
(via playback of simulated encounters). Experiments shall be conducted mainly in
captivity, on a total of four species (ravens, carrion crows, rooks and jackdaws).
Observations shall be conducted in the area of the Cumberland Wildpark Grünau, in the
Northern Austrian Alps (ravens), in the area of Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna (carrion crows)
and in Leon, Spain (cooperatively breeding population of carrion crows).
Project 2/ Tecumseh Fitch:
A) Acoustics of Individual Displays in Ravens
The trainee is supervised by Tecumseh Fitch and will conduct detailed analysis of the
highly idiosyncratic and multimodal displays of adult ravens from both structural/acoustic
and gestural perspectives. We will use principles of vocal production to analyze the use
of source and filter components in these displays and use repeated measures analysis
within birds to extract the reliability of these different cues. We will then use
touch-screen experiments to explore ravens' classification of calls whose acoustic and
visual properties are experimentally varied. Finally, we will perform a combined
environment/genetic analysis to analyze how these different aspects of displays are driven
by upbringing and by genetics, and thus how the uncovered acoustic cues may provide
reliable cues to genetics, provenance, and individual identity.
Or
B) Mechanisms and Perception of Vocalization in Canids
The trainee is supervised by Tecumseh Fitch and will start with a thorough exploration of
canid vocal production (both source and filter components, cf); the second step will be
construction of a dog vocal tract model and synthesizer. This tool will then be used in
playback experiments to generate synthetic stimuli, to gain understanding of the various
acoustics cues present in dog growls, barks, whines and howls, and how these are perceived
and categorized by other listening dogs.
Project 3/ Walter Hödl:
Acoustic and Spatial Neighbor Recognition in Poison Frogs
Based on our knowledge of call parameters carrying the potential for individual
recognition
(Gasser et al. 2009), play-back experiments in the field will test for a possible
dear-enemy effect in the highly territorial and acoustically very active Brilliant-thighed
Poison Frog. Allobates femoralis has been the main bioacoustic study object of W. Hödl,
supervisor of this project, for over 20 years. Field studies will be organized in the CNRS
station Pararé, Nouragues, French Guyana, where we have been working in collaboration with
South American, French and US colleagues for over 20 years.
A genotyped population of A. femoralis will be established on a yet unpopulated river
island across the field station Pararé in 2011. This closed population will allow the
study of various aspects of the population genetics, behavior and ecology of A. femoralis
without disturbing effects of migration in a naturally delimited research area. Foci of
the PhD-project will include adult and juvenile orientation, neighbor recognition, space
use and communication while other students will analyze genetic drift, bottleneck and
founder effects. In addition to field observations, A. femoralis will be kept (and bred)
in the Vienna lab to study kin and individual recognition based on acoustic and visual
traits.
Project 4/ Ludwig Huber:
Analogical reasoning in birds (keas, ravens, pigeons)
One of the most controversially debated topics about animal pre-linguistic abilities is
the ability of analogical reasoning (reasoning based on the inference that if two or more
things agree with one another in some respects it is likely that they will agree in
others). Until now, only language-trained animals have unequivocally shown this ability.
The project supervised by Ludwig Huber, aims at elucidating the relationship between the
cognitive and communicative aspects of this ability.
Among birds, corvids and parrots are prime candidates for advanced cognitive abilities.
For comparative avian cognition, these two groups are particularly interesting as their
cognitive abilities are most likely the result of convergent evolution. These two
large-brained birds shall be compared to pigeons, which have shown to be surprisingly
competent in terms of picture discrimination and categorization, but less so in abstract
and analogical tasks.
Project 5/ Kurt Kotrschal
A) The Social Components and Physiology of Cooperative Hunting in Grey Wolves
Wolves elaborately cooperate over raising offspring, hunting and territorial defence.
Social carnivores may indeed be superior to apes or monkeys as models for investigating
the biology of cooperation. This PhD project supervised by Kurt Kotrschal would make use
of a unique resource worldwide, provided by the Wolf Science Centre: more than a dozen
well trained grey wolves and a number of equally raised dogs can be employed in a variety
of experiments. A treadmill allows to stage experimental social hunts. Basic questions are
how much energy different individuals would invest in hunting, how that affects their
readiness to share food and to cooperate in other tasks after the hunt, how personality,
sex, life history or social context affect investment in hunting, etc.
OR
B) Dog-human relationships
We recently showed that the relationship between dogs and their owners and the practical
operationality of dyads mainly depends on owner personality and attitude as well as dyadic
sex distribution. For example, owners high in “neuroticism” (NEO-FFI-axis 1) maintained an
affective relationship with their dogs, appreciating them mainly as social supporters.
Their dogs showed low cortisol values, but the dyadic performance in a practical task was
also low. Human-animal dyads indeed, provide model insights into the principles of
long-term vertebrate dyadic relationships.
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*ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Ludwig Huber*
*Department of Cognitive Biology*
*Faculty of Life Sciences*
*University of Vienna*
*Biocenter, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria*
*office +43-1-4277-76110; mobile +43-664-60277-76110; fax +43-1-4277-9761*
*email: ludwig.huber(a)univie.ac.at website: cogbio.univie.ac.at*
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