Some philosophers argue that reflection, the ability to assess one’s reasons for beliefs and actions, is the defining feature of rational thinking. However, they also tie reflective thinking to linguistic abilities, excluding human infants and non-human animals. To assess capacities for basic reflective thinking, without linguistic requirements, we investigated whether 2-year-old children, dogs, or pigs could identify information coming from an unreliable informant as misleading. In an object-search task, one informant’s actions reliably indicated the location of a reward, while another informants actions were unreliable, indicating the reward location in 50% of trials. The informants used three different actions to hide rewards to put subjects in the position to make generalisations about the reliability of the evidence provided by each informant. Neither 2-year-olds nor animals responded differently to the reliable and unreliable informants. However, while children became less likely to follow the indications of either informant in later trials, animals continued to follow both at a similar rate. This could suggest that children were responding differently to the evidence in the task compared to the dogs and pigs.

MSTeams link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmeetup-join%2F19%3A9823d93069124396a7a40d99c8272bea%40thread.tacv2%2F1706004113357%3Fcontext%3D%257b%2522Tid%2522%253a%25224e8d09f7-cc79-4ccb-9149-a4238dd17422%2522%252c%2522Oid%2522%253a%25221a69c354-6581-4fd4-8530-c53f9ead0876%2522%257d%26anon%3Dtrue&type=meetup-join&deeplinkId=a1b73d26-7d67-4bcc-acbd-a387a288132b&directDl=true&msLaunch=true&enableMobilePage=true&suppressPrompt=true

Spring Semester speakers:

Date	Time	Speaker	Format
13/03/2024	16:00	Kirsten Blakey (Stirling)	Talk F2F/hybrid
20/03/2024	16:00	Impact research catch up	F2F
27/03/2024	16:00	Sylvain Lamoine (Cambridge)	Online
03/04/2024	16:00	Review of BERG research strategy (core BERG)	F2F
10/04/2024	16:00
17/04/2024	16:00	Victor Shirimizu (Strathclyde)	F2F (Room 4B96)
24/04/2024	16:00	Lifespan Equipment Demonstration
01/05/2024	16:00	Victoria Lee (SRUC)	F2F/hybrid
08/05/2024	10:00	James Brooks (Kyoto)	Online
15/05/2024
22/05/2024	16:00	Elodie Freymann	online

Dr Pawel Fedurek (he/his) 

Lecturer in Psychology 

Behaviour and Evolution Research Group (BERG) 

 

Division of Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences 

University of Stirling 

Stirling, FK9 4LA 
Scotland, UK 

 

Tel: +44 (0)1786 467844 

Twitter: @fedurekp  @BERG_Stirling​

Staff page | BERG page

 

I aim to reply within 3 working days (my working days are between Monday and Friday). 

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