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. "
[cid:ce5525cf-f3aa-403e-9405-d749af5b5c73]
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