[koglist] Invitation - BME Cognitive Seminar Series / Meghívó - BME Kognitív Szemináriumsorozat

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