Dear BERGers,

This week at BERG our speaker is Guillermo Hidalgo Gadea who will be talking about his MSc Project in Evolutionary Psychology titled, “Spontaneous numerical cognition in human and non-human primates”. Guillermo plans to focus his talk on the combination of discrete and continuous magnitude features in a quantity discrimination task. Along with very preliminary results for human and chimpanzee performance, there will be a short outlook on further data analysis and lots of fun videos. 

Abstract:
"Much work has been conducted in human and non-human animals’ performance in relative quantity discrimination (Agrillo & Bisaza, 2014; Gallistel & Gelman, 2000), and results indicate that human and non-human animals may share a magnitude scale, i.e. the approximate number system (ANS; Cantlon, Platt & Brannon, 2009). Discrimination performance has been shown to be subject to Weber’s law, resulting in lower performance discriminating between similar quantities, and lower performance discriminating between large quantities, thus varying as a function of the ratio between the smaller and the larger quantity (Beran & Parrish, 2016). Nevertheless, little is known about how accurate primates mentally represent and combine different magnitude features, e.g. continuous (size) and discrete (numerosity) magnitudes, to discriminate total quantities.  This research aims to explore quantity representation and feature preferences in different primate species, analysing limits of spontaneous quantity discrimination in competing magnitude features. "

Our meeting is at the usual time and venue: 5.30 p.m. in the Common Room (3A94), with the usual drinks and nibbles.

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An up to date copy of our schedule can be found at:
https://stir.app.box.com/s/rwzik2tsai3kausdtekqvgayv34otmgt

See you all on Wednesday.

Best Wishes,
Deborah