We cordially invite you to the next lecture
of the BME
Cognitive Seminar Series:
Date & Time: April 15, Monday, 12:00-13:00
Cold-blooded social cognition
Anna Kis
Research
Centre for Natural
Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology,
Department
of Ethology,
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