[BERG] BERG seminar this week

Dear all, On Wednesday this week at 4pm, Dr. Claire Hemingway (Texas University, USA) will be talking about decision-making in bumblebees. Please, see below the title and short abstract for her talk. This meeting will be online (link below). Economic foraging in a floral marketplace: decision making in bumblebees When making decisions, animals often compare available options to those that were recently encountered. Such decisions can be complex, often requiring individuals to compare multiple features associated with each option and their reward payoffs, to those of recently encountered options. Bumblebees are a useful system to address this topic, given that they forage on a wide variety of flowers, and in doing so rapidly integrate information about floral stimuli and rewards to learn about and make decisions between flowers. I will present recent work showing how reward perception in bumblebees is affected not only by recent experience with rewards, but also experience with associated stimuli. I will also discuss how this form of evaluation plays out in a natural foraging environment. Finally, I discuss ongoing work focused on how bees evaluate multiple dimensions of reward quality and how these multi-attribute choices can bias decision making. These findings shed insight on general processes of reward perception and decision-making in animals. Best, Gema Schedule for future meetings: Date Time Speaker Topic Location 19/10/2022 4pm Kristine Gandia (University of Stirling) TBC F2F (Common Room, Psych) 02/11/2022 3-5pm Joint meeting—BERG & BES TBC F2F (Common Room, Psych) 09/11/2022 4pm Francesca de Petrillo (Newcastle University, UK) Decision-making in primates Online 16/11/2022 4pm Stephen Ferrigno (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA) Origins of human thought Online 23/11/2022 4pm Sarah Weir (University of Stirling) TBC Online 30/11/2022 4pm Sabrina Brando (University of Stirling) Individual, leadership, and organisational aspects of human wellbeing in zoos and aquariums F2F (Common Room, Psych) 07/12/2022 4pm Gloria Sabbatini (Istc-CNR Unit of Cognitive Primatology & Primate Center, Italy) Tool use in primates Online 14/12/2022 3pm Elias Garcia Pelegrin (University of Cambridge, UK) Crows and understanding of magic tricks Online 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