Selection shapes diverse animal minds
Theo Murphy meeting organised by Professor Elli Leadbeater and Professor Alex Thornton.
What are the evolutionary processes that have produced extraordinary cognitive diversity across the animal kingdom? New approaches, informed by evolutionary biology, neuroscience and psychology, are allowing us to elucidate how different aspects of cognition enhance survival and reproduction for species that live very different lives. This meeting will explore how natural selection customizes animal minds to maximise evolutionary success.
The schedule of talks and speaker biographies is available below. Speaker abstracts will be available closer to the meeting date.
Poster session
There will be a poster session on Monday 3 June. If you would like to apply to present a poster please submit your proposed title, abstract (not more than 200 words and in third person), author list, name of the proposed presenter and institution to the Scientific Programmes no later than Friday 5 April. Please include the text ‘Poster abstract submission - Animal minds’ in the email subject line. Please note that places are limited and posters are selected at the scientific organisers’ discretion.
Attending this event
This event is intended for researchers in relevant fields, and is a residential meeting taking place at the Apex City of Bath Hotel, James Street West, Bath, BA1 2DA.
- Free to attend
- Advance registration essential
- This is an in-person meeting
- Catering options are available to purchase during registration. Participants are responsible for their own accommodation booking
Enquiries: contact the Scientific Programmes team
Organisers
Schedule
Chair
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Elli's research centres around the ecology and evolution of social insects, and specifically the evolution of bee cognition. She is interested in how cognitive abilities have been shaped by natural selection to fit different ecological contexts, and also in how those same abilities function in the entirely novel environments presented by the Anthropocene. She is a Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Royal Holloway University of London, where she's been based for 10 years. Prior to that, she studied social wasp societies at the Institute of Zoology in London and the University of Sussex, having completed a PhD in bumblebee behaviour in 2008 at Queen Mary University of London. She is an ERC grantee and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship holder, and was recently awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London.
09:00-09:10 |
Welcome by the Royal Society and lead organiser
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09:10-09:35 |
A circuit view of evolving cognition
Dr Stephen Montgomery, University of Bristol, UK
Dr Stephen Montgomery, University of Bristol, UKDr Montgomery's primary interests are focused around how brains and behaviour evolve. He did his PhD on primate brain evolution with Dr Nick Mundy, at the University of Cambridge, and then held a series of fellowships at Oxford and UCL, with Professor Judith Mank, before returning to Cambridge to establish his own group. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow, funded by a NERC Fellowship and an ERC Starter Grant, and Proleptic Senior Lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. His group is interested in how brains adapt to different environments, how changes in brain structure produce behavioural differences, and how selection navigates developmental and functional constraints that may limit or channel the adaptive response. They take a comparative approach to tackling these questions, comparing molecular and phenotypic data across species. |
09:35-09:50 |
Discussion
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09:50-10:15 |
Dr Johan Lind, University of Stockholm, Sweden
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10:15-10:30 |
Discussion
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10:30-10:50 |
Break
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10:50-11:15 |
Lost in translation: are psychological concepts really species-neutral?
Professor Louise Barrett, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Professor Louise Barrett, University of Lethbridge, CanadaLouise Barrett was trained as an ecologist and anthropologist at University College London, UK. Following her PhD, Barrett took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of KwaZulu Natal, before returning to increasingly senior posts in the UK, and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. In 2007 she moved to the University of Lethbridge, where she is Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Evolution, Cognition and Behaviour. She has run two long-term field studies on baboons and vervet monkeys in South Africa, that have explored the complexities of social life and its potential links to the evolution of brain size and social intelligence. She studies the latter through the application of theories of embodied and inactive cognition. She is the author of Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds. |
11:15-11:30 |
Discussion
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11:30-11:55 |
Talk title tbc
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UK
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UKAlex Thornton is a Professor of Cognitive Evolution at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus), where he runs the Wild Cognition Research Group. His work seeks to understand how the challenges faced by animals in their natural environments shape their mental processes, how the ability to learn from others affects the behaviour of individuals and groups, and how culture itself evolves. His research incorporates approaches from evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology using a range of different study systems. Current research focuses primarily on cognition and behaviour in wild jackdaws, the cognitive requirements of human culture and the application of cognitive research in conservation. |
11:55-12:10 |
Discussion
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12:10-12:35 |
Spatial memory in the real world: its contribution to home ranges, predation and survival
Dr Joah Madden, University of Exeter, UK
Dr Joah Madden, University of Exeter, UKDr Madden works in the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. They started working on questions about sexual selection and mate choice, using spotted bowerbirds as a model system, before working on communication, conflict and cooperation in brood parasites and meerkats. They moved to the Department of Psychology, Exeter, in 2007 and since then they have been increasingly drawn to try to understand how selection may act on cognitive abilities that underpin natural behaviours. Dr Madden has used a within-species approach where they measure individual differences and explore resulting fitness consequences. They find this especially interesting when considering that the same (sets of) abilities may contribute to a disparate set of behaviours, raising the potential for conflicting selection pressures, and when considering why exaggeration of these abilities may not always be beneficial. Dr Madden has used a range of systems to ask these questions, with a recent focus on the genius of the bird world, the pheasant. |
12:35-12:50 |
Discussion
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Chair
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UK
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UK
Alex Thornton is a Professor of Cognitive Evolution at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus), where he runs the Wild Cognition Research Group. His work seeks to understand how the challenges faced by animals in their natural environments shape their mental processes, how the ability to learn from others affects the behaviour of individuals and groups, and how culture itself evolves. His research incorporates approaches from evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology using a range of different study systems. Current research focuses primarily on cognition and behaviour in wild jackdaws, the cognitive requirements of human culture and the application of cognitive research in conservation.
14:00-14:25 |
Ecology and the value of memory for foraging insects
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UKElli's research centres around the ecology and evolution of social insects, and specifically the evolution of bee cognition. She is interested in how cognitive abilities have been shaped by natural selection to fit different ecological contexts, and also in how those same abilities function in the entirely novel environments presented by the Anthropocene. She is a Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Royal Holloway University of London, where she's been based for 10 years. Prior to that, she studied social wasp societies at the Institute of Zoology in London and the University of Sussex, having completed a PhD in bumblebee behaviour in 2008 at Queen Mary University of London. She is an ERC grantee and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship holder, and was recently awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London. |
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14:25-14:40 |
Discussion
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14:40-15:05 |
Inference of selection over the course of hominin brain expansion
Dr Mauricio González-Forero, University of St Andrews, UK
Dr Mauricio González-Forero, University of St Andrews, UKDr González-Forero earned a BSc in Biology with a minor in mathematics at the University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia, in 2006. They then completed a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2013 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, supervised by Sergey Gavrilets. They subsequently did a 3-year postdoc at the University of Lausanne, supervised by Laurent Lehmann, where they formulated a mathematical model of brain life-history evolution. They then received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to work at the University of St Andrews, UK, supervised by Andy Gardner, to use the brain model to assess the ecological and social brain hypotheses for human brain size evolution. They have since remained at St Andrews formulating a mathematical synthesis of development and evolution to model the evolutionary and developmental dynamics of human brain size. |
15:05-15:20 |
Discussion
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15:20-15:40 |
Break
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15:40-16:05 |
Mutational origins and selection dynamics of cognitive traits in animals
Dr Michael Sheehan, Cornell University, USA
Dr Michael Sheehan, Cornell University, USAMichael Sheehan is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, where he started as an Assistant Professor in 2015. His lab studies the evolution and consequences of social behaviour and cognition, especially as it relates to social recognition, using both paper wasps and house mice as empirical models. His work combines field studies, evolutionary analyses, physiology, neural recordings, as well as population and functional genomics to gain an integrated understanding of social behaviour and cognition. |
16:05-16:20 |
Discussion
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16:20-16:45 |
Demonstrating reproductive consequences of cognition
Professor Sue Healy, University of St Andrews, UK
Professor Sue Healy, University of St Andrews, UKFrom an undergraduate degree from Otago, New Zealand through a DPhil at Oxford on the behavioural and neural bases of food storing in birds, Sue has geographically moved steadily north in the UK, via Newcastle (Psychology) and Edinburgh (Evolutionary Biology) to St Andrews where she is now in the School of Biology. Her questions on animal cognition are addressed to testing spatial abilities in wild, free-living hummingbirds in the Rocky Mountains, and nest building in birds, in the lab and the field. With an interest in the evolution of the brain, she also examines the neural and hormonal bases of cognition where possible. |
16:45-17:00 |
Discussion
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Chair
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Professor Elli Leadbeater, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Elli's research centres around the ecology and evolution of social insects, and specifically the evolution of bee cognition. She is interested in how cognitive abilities have been shaped by natural selection to fit different ecological contexts, and also in how those same abilities function in the entirely novel environments presented by the Anthropocene. She is a Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Royal Holloway University of London, where she's been based for 10 years. Prior to that, she studied social wasp societies at the Institute of Zoology in London and the University of Sussex, having completed a PhD in bumblebee behaviour in 2008 at Queen Mary University of London. She is an ERC grantee and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship holder, and was recently awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London.
09:00-09:25 |
Cognitive evolution: the mechanisms may be simple but their fine-turning may not be
Professor Arnon Lotem, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Professor Arnon Lotem, Tel-Aviv University, IsraelArnon Lotem’s research combines theoretical and experimental work on the interface between Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution with a special focus on learning, decision making, and cognitive evolution. He obtained his PhD at Tel-Aviv University (1992, with Amotz Zahavi) and did his Postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia with Jamie Smith (1992-1994, Killam and NSERC Fellow). In 1994 he received the Alon Fellowship, and is since a faculty member at the School of Zoology of Tel-Aviv University, where he served as the school head for the past four years. He is currently the Norman and Rose Lederer Chair of Biology. |
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09:25-09:40 |
Discussion
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09:40-10:05 |
Cognition, decision-making and life history
Professor Daniel Sol, IBE, Spain
Professor Daniel Sol, IBE, SpainDaniel Sol (PhD, University of Barcelona, 2000) is a CSIC Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) in Barcelona, with broad interests in ecology and evolution. Sol’s research program integrates theoretical modelling, field studies, experiments and comparative approaches to understand the causes and consequences of biodiversity change under global change. This research has contributed to develop the 'cognitive buffer hypothesis', a more general life history theory for demographic responses to environmental changes, and improved global estimations of biodiversity loss. |
10:05-10:20 |
Discussion
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10:20-10:40 |
Break
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10:40-11:05 |
The primate origins of human cognition
Dr Alexandra Rosati, University of Michigan, USA
Dr Alexandra Rosati, University of Michigan, USAAlexandra Rosati received an AB in Psychology from Harvard University, a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from Duke University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr Rosati’s research examines the evolutionary origins of the human mind through comparative studies of cognition and behaviour in other primates. Her work focuses on the emergence of capacities for complex decision-making and social cognition, examining how different species think and solve important problems in their social and physical environment. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Leakey Foundation. She has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and the American Psychological Association’s Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology. |
11:05-11:20 |
Discussion
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11:20-11:45 |
Simple minds yet profound insights: nematodes and fruitflies in the service of evolutionary ecology of cognition
Dr Martyna Zwoinska, Uppsala University, Sweden
Dr Martyna Zwoinska, Uppsala University, SwedenMartyna Zwoinska is an evolutionary biologist with a PhD from Uppsala University. Her research began with an exploration of the connections between the evolution of cognitive and life-history traits, such as lifespan and reproduction. For this purpose, she utilised relatively unassuming organisms like Caenorhabditis nematode worms and Drosophila fruit flies. Despite their apparent simplicity, these model organisms offered the advantage of employing a powerful approach of experimental evolution, whereby organisms evolve over multiple generations under conditions imposed by the experimenter. Thereafter, Martyna has focused on the genomic aspects of adaptation, and in particular on the selective forces that maintain genetic variation in populations. This has included the study of evolution under temporally varying environments, with special emphasis on the interplay between genetic adaptation and plastic, environmentally-induced responses like learning and other cognitive traits. |
11:45-12:00 |
Discussion
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12:00-12:25 |
Fish cognitive abilities and the brain
Dr Zegni Triki, University of Bern, Switzerland
Dr Zegni Triki, University of Bern, SwitzerlandZegni Triki is a veterinary surgeon by training. She practised as a veterinarian in rural Algeria for a few years before switching to academia and moving to Switzerland. Zegni completed a master's and PhD in biology at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, where she studied the mechanisms underlying fish behaviour and cognition in varying ecologies. With the support of a fellowship from the Swiss Science Foundation, Zegni moved to Sweden for a postdoc. Since 2022, she has been leading her research group at the University of Bern in Switzerland, using cichlid fish as the primary study model organism. Zegni’s research group is currently conducting experiments that integrate animal physiology, neurobiology, endocrinology, ecology, and life history to understand the variation in cognitive performance among individuals and ultimately, the evolution of cognitive abilities. |
12:25-12:40 |
Discussion
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Chair
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UK
Professor Alex Thornton, University of Exeter, UK
Alex Thornton is a Professor of Cognitive Evolution at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus), where he runs the Wild Cognition Research Group. His work seeks to understand how the challenges faced by animals in their natural environments shape their mental processes, how the ability to learn from others affects the behaviour of individuals and groups, and how culture itself evolves. His research incorporates approaches from evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology using a range of different study systems. Current research focuses primarily on cognition and behaviour in wild jackdaws, the cognitive requirements of human culture and the application of cognitive research in conservation.
13:40-14:05 |
Interactions of experimentally evolved bias and learning
Dr Aimee Dunlap, University of Missouri St Louis, USA
Dr Aimee Dunlap, University of Missouri St Louis, USAAimee Dunlap is an Associate Professor of Biology and Co-Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her research focuses on the evolutionary ecology of learning and decision making in changing environments. This work spans time scales from multiple generations in laboratory experimental evolution to single foraging bouts in lab-based studies with flies and bees, as well as spatial scales in the field across urban gradients and other anthropogenically altered habitats. She received a BS in Biology and a BA in History and English from the University of Memphis, a MS from Northern Arizona University and a PhD from the University of Minnesota as a fellow with the Center for Cognitive Sciences. |
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14:05-14:20 |
Discussion
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14:20-14:45 |
Levels of analysis? Sensorimotor competencies, life histories, conserved computational motifs and developmental linkages together generate brain organization
Professor Barbara L Finlay, Cornell University, USA
Professor Barbara L Finlay, Cornell University, USABarbara L Finlay is the W.R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology Emerita (fewer committees, more research!) at Cornell University. She is the co-editor, with Paul Bloom, of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a forum for the communication, criticism, stimulation, and particularly the unification of research in behavioral and brain sciences from molecular neurobiology to the philosophy of the mind. She received her Ph.D. from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 1976, her training integrating primate sensory physiology and developmental neurobiology. Moving directly to Cornell University, she found an intellectual home among its eclectic thinkers including James and Eleanor Gibson in perception and development, Dick Neisser in Cognitive Science and Bob Capranica in neuroethology, and was chair of the Department of Psychology from 1995-2001. Over that time, she has had visiting appointments in Oxford University, the University of New South Wales, INSERM, the Federal University of Parà, Brazil, the University of Western Australia, “Wiko” in Berlin, Birkbeck College of the University of London, and most recently the Institute for Advanced Research in Shanghai. Her research was in evo-devo before it had its name, first examining how early neuron overproduction and death, and early axonal exuberance might support brain adaptation and evolution. More recently she has focused on what aspects of neurodevelopmental timing can be altered in evolution (www.translatingtime.org ), and how conserved elements of neural development support graceful scaling and progressively change brain function when brain size increases. Presently, she has expanded this interest in neurodevelopmental timing to include alteration in life histories over the lifespan, especially care-taking and care-seeking. This last interest requires new attention to motivation and emotion, and to the evolution of pain perception and expression to be explored at this conference. |
14:45-15:00 |
Discussion
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15:00-15:30 |
Break
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15:30-15:55 |
Living on the edge – what food-caching chickadees can teach us about the evolution of cognition
Professor Vladimir Pravosudov, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Professor Vladimir Pravosudov, University of Nevada, Reno, USADr Vladimir Pravosudov is a Foundation Professor and a Trevor J. McMinn Endowed Research Professor in Science at the University of Nevada Reno, USA. Dr Pravosudov received his MS degree in Zoology at the University of Leningrad in Russia and his PhD in Zoology at the Ohio State University in the US. Using food-caching Parids as a model, Pravosudov’s research investigates spatial cognition associated with food caching behaviour and the hippocampus, a brain region involved in spatial learning and memory. Food-caching parids rely on numerous food caches scattered throughout their home ranges to survive winter and have specialized spatial cognition needed to recover these caches. Current research in Pravosudov’s lab uses wild chickadees in their natural environment and focuses on (i) fitness consequences and the genetic basis of individual variation in spatial cognitive abilities to understand how environmental variation can contribute to the evolution of spatial cognition, (ii) potential trade-offs between specialized spatial memory and cognitive flexibility. |
15:55-16:10 |
Proximate and ultimate drivers of primate brain evolution
Dr Alex DeCasien, National Institute of Mental Health, USA
Dr Alex DeCasien, National Institute of Mental Health, USADr Alex DeCasien is an evolutionary neuroscientist, biological anthropologist, and computational biologist whose work illuminates the proximate and ultimate drivers of within and between species variation in primate brains. After receiving their PhD in Biological Anthropology from NYU in 2021, Alex joined the Section of Developmental Neurogenomics at the NIMH as a postdoctoral fellow. Their current research involves: i) characterizing normative multi-omic age and sex differences in human brains; ii) linking these differences to disease mechanisms; and iii) comparing these patterns to those observed in other species. |
16:10-17:00 |
Panel discussion
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