[BERG] BERG seminar, Wednesday 16:00

Dear BERGers, Quick reminder that this Wednesday (4 May), Dr Laura Lewis (Harvard University) will be giving a seminar about her comparative research on chimpanzee and bonobo cognition. Please see the abstract, and the link to the meeting, below. Hope to see you on Wednesday! Abstract: "Humans have remarkable adaptations for processing and participating in intricately complex social groups. Foundational among them are our abilities to identify and differentiate between unique individuals, our long-term memory for social affiliates, and our ability to comprehend social language. Despite the centrality of these skills to human social life, we know relatively little about their evolutionary origins in our primate lineage. Humans’ closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, live in large social groups of up to 150 individuals but often range in smaller foraging parties that change in social composition throughout the day (i.e., fission-fusion dynamics). Consequently, they too would greatly benefit from these social cognitive skills. Importantly, the similarities and differences in the socioecology of chimpanzees and bonobos allow us to test competing hypotheses about the selective pressures that heightened humans’ sensitivity to group membership and drove the evolution of our complex sociality and language capacities. By studying these species’ socio-cognitive abilities and patterns, this dissertation aims to clarify the extent to which the cognitive foundations of humans’ social relationships are shared with our closest relatives and were likely already present in our last common ancestor. Utilizing non-invasive eye-tracking technology to explore social attention, long-term social memory, and socially referential language comprehension in chimpanzees and bonobos, this dissertation sheds light on the phylogenetic precursors of human social cognition and the selective pressures that led to the evolution of our uniquely sophisticated social environments.” Link to the meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmee… Forthcoming seminars: Date Time Speaker Affiliation Seminar title 04/05/2022 16:00 Laura Lewis Harvard University TBC, bonobo and chimpanzee cognition 11/05/2022 16:00 Alexander Weiss University of Edinburgh TBC 18/05/2022 16:00 Eva Reindl Durham University TBC 25/05/2022 16:00 Shelley Culpepper University of Stirling Interspecific Olfactory Perception of Human Emotions: From the Horses Perspective ________________________________ The University achieved an overall 5 stars in the QS World University Rankings 2020 UK Sports University of the Year 2020 (Times Higher Good University Guide) The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159.