[BERG] BERG seminar this week

Dear All, On Wednesday this week at 3pm, Elias Garcia Pelegrin (National University of Singapore) will be talking about perception and deception in different animal species. Please, see below the title and short abstract for his talk. This meeting will be online (link below). Using sleight of hand to investigate human action perception in diverse taxa. Deceptive tactics depend on the deceiver being able to trick their victim. Magicians are successful in misleading their victim (or audience) because their actions capitalise on perceptual and attentional predispositions. Intricate sleight of hand movements (i.e., range of techniques involving hand motions commonly used by both magicians and pickpockets to deceive fellow human observers) can manipulate where the observers’ attention is drawn so they can be tricked into looking elsewhere or thinking something different from reality. The success of these deceptive movements is contingent on the magicians and pickpockets’ ability to take advantage of these perceptual and attentional predispositions. It is this phenomenon that I refer to as “cognitive blind-spots” (Garcia-Pelegrin et al., 2020). Using sleight of hand movements to investigate the mind can yield thought-provoking results; highlighting the elaborate deceptive qualities of these intricate movements, and the cognitive blind-spots that they exploit. Considering the evidence highlighting the power of these techniques in misleading the average human observer, one may wonder to what extent the expectations capitalised by sleight of hand are intrinsically human, and whether similar perception control tactics can be effectively used in other animal minds. The application of these deceptive motions to investigate the non-human mind can yield great insight into the evolution and inner-workings of the cognitive blind-spots exploited by these techniques. Are these cognitive blind-spots unique to humans? Do other non-human primates perceive human action like humans? Do other taxa have similar cognitive blind-spots when observing human deceptive movements, and can we explain similarities and disparities in perceptual predispositions because of cognitive capacity, neural structure, or other physical features? My research has made some advances towards understanding the cognitive blind-spots across species by systematically presenting deceitful sleight of hand movements to non-human animals and analysing their responses. In this presentation, I will explore these questions by reviewing the most recent studies with members of the corvid family and non-human primates to illustrate how the intersection between deceptive techniques and science can yield invaluable insight into the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of both human and non-human animals. Best, Gema Link to the online meetings: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmee… ________________________________ Scotland’s University for Sporting Excellence The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159