Dear all,

It is my great pleasure to let you know that our Cognition Journal Club will be hosting Prof. Charlotte K. Hemelrijk next Monday at 1pm via Teams.

Charlotte is full professor of the self-organisation of social systems at the University Groningen in the Netherlands. Her main topics of study, at present, are the collective escape in bird flocks and dominance relations between the sexes in all kinds of animals. For studying the dynamics of intersexual dominance, she develops bottom-up computational models and tests them in real animals, with a focus on primates and rodents.

In the upcoming CJC, Charlotte will be talking about the dynamics of dominance between the sexes in primates, which nicely aligns and greatly extends our last CJC. Please find below an abstract of what she will be talking about:

In social systems of animals their dominance of females relative to males matter to females, for instance, when defending themselves against sexual harassment and when competing for food. Females in group-living primates are usually smaller than males. Yet despite their smaller body size, females are often seen to dominate a few males. In the present study, we show that female dominance over males increases due to the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing fights under certain conditions. First, in computational models, we show this happens when the aggression of both sexes is fiercer, aggression by males is more intense than by females, the fraction of males in the group is higher, and females need more food than males. Second, we confirm these model-based hypotheses in empirical data of macaques, vervet monkeys, capuchin monkeys, lemurs and humans.

Please feel free to forward this mail and come along.

You can join the meeting by clicking the link below or clicking “join” in our CJC Team on the day.

Best wishes,

Manon