Dear BERGers, This is a reminder that Kirsten Blakey (University of Stirling) will be giving a seminar this Wednesday (16:00, common room/hybrid) entitled "Assessing capacities for reflective belief revision in 2-year-olds, dogs, and pigs". Please see the abstract below. Abstract 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%2Fmee… 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<tel:+441786467844> Twitter: @fedurekp<https://twitter.com/fedurekp> @BERG_Stirling​<https://twitter.com/BERG_Stirling> Staff page<https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/1080868> | BERG page<https://www.stir.ac.uk/about/faculties/natural-sciences/our-research/research-groups/behaviour-and-evolution-research-group/> I aim to reply within 3 working days (my working days are between Monday and Friday). ________________________________ Scotland’s University for Sporting Excellence The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159