Dear All,
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk.
Speaker: Thibaud Gruber<https://www.unige.ch/fapse/eccePAN/fr/team/thibaud-gruber>
<https://www.unige.ch/cisa/center/members/gruber-thibaud/>
Title: An affective, behavioral and cognitive story of the evolution of communication and
culture in humans and other great apes
The studies of the evolution of language and culture are intertwined. Often, the same
mechanisms – including the usual suspects such as imitation – are argued to be at the
heart of the evolution of both. In addition, in the last decades, research on social
learning in non-humans vs humans has largely focused on behavioral and cognitive
processes, while research on non-human vs human communication has often opposed cognitive
processes to emotional ones. These two approaches sometimes fall in the pitfall of looking
for the one characteristic that makes us unique amongst other animals. In this talk, I
want to focus on the commonalities between animal and human social learning, with the goal
to braid together literature from social learning, affective development, and the
evolution of communication. All three domains can be unified in an ABC model of social
learning, which aims to provide a combined Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive approach to
the acquisition of knowledge in a broad sense. Affect, for example through motivation or
emotions, indeed colors our quest for knowledge and for knowledge transmission. I will
rediscuss classic examples of the animal literature such as the vervet alarm call system
or the acquisition of tool use in chimpanzees. The ABC framework also allows introducing
continuity between so-called simple and complex cognitive processes, which makes it a more
realistic pathway for their attribution to animals or non-verbal infants. As such it opens
new avenues of research to resolve the debates on the evolution of communication and
culture, particularly in our lineage.
Thibaud Gruber is a primatologist and a comparative psychologist whose has been working
over 15 years on the topics of the evolution of culture and communication in great apes
and humans. After a Master in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, he pursued a PhD in
Psychology at the University of St Andrews, UK in 2011. He then obtained his Habilitation
in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, in 2018. He has held postdoctoral research
positions at the University of Zürich, Neuchâtel and Geneva, funded by the Fyssen
Foundation, the Marie Curie initiative of the European Commission, and the Swiss National
Science Foundation. In 2020, thanks to an Eccellenza Fellowship from the SNSF, he has set
up his own lab, the eccePAN lab (Ecology, Cognition, Communication, Emotion), at the
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, at the University of Geneva, with a joint
position at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences.
Time: 16:00, Thursday, 28 November 2024
Location: Vienna Campus, Quellenstrasse 51, Room : QS D-002 Tiered
Zoom: Meeting ID: 984 1754
5209<https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98417545209?pwd=909i0Oc5aydidvanERaSfHkbKzEZmh.1>
Passcode: 041432
Hosts: Thomas Ganzetti and Günther Knoblich
Best regards,
Andi
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