plores the evolutionary mechanisms that underpin social dynamics and asks how cooperation is maintained in animal societies.
Heterogeneity of life courses
Dr. Raisa Hernandez-Pacheco, California State University at Long Beach
Predicting ecological and evolutionary dynamics requires an understanding of the diversity of life courses among individuals, since life courses shape demography, which in turn drives evolution. Heterogeneity among individuals influences the speed of adaptive and neutral evolutionary processes, but it is less clear how biotic and abiotic environmental fluctuations influence variability among individuals. Such variability is reflected in individual life courses, defined as the sequence of stages experienced during an individual’s life. Identifying the sources of variation in life courses remains a fundamental task to address in order to understand the meaning and significance of phenotypic variation within populations. A multi-stage model using a first-order Markov process describing reproductive dynamics, as well as estimates of population entropy are being used.
Understanding of Animate and Inanimate Objects in Rhesus Macaques
Dr. Laurie Santos, Yale University
The aim of this study is to explore what rhesus macaques understand about the physical and social world. This project first examines whether rhesus monkeys reason about agents in the same way as humans do – by considering their intentions, beliefs, and desires. These questions are to significant importance in the field of developmental psychology and comparative cognition – the question of whether non-human primates can reason about objects and agents has been one of the longest-standing questions in the field of primate cognition. In addition, learning more about how monkeys reason about agents will provide a potential animal model of human disorders to agency understanding (e.g. autism).
Genetics of Social Decision Making in Rhesus Macaques
Dr. Michel Platt, University of Pennsylvania
The current investigation seeks to understand the neural mechanisms responsible for making decisions, approached with a panoply of behavioral, physiological and genetic techniques. His current research aims to examine genetic and endocrinological factors underlying individual variation in social behaviors and the processing of social information in rhesus macaques. This research is part of a larger effort to develop an animal model of complex social behavior which can be used as a model to understand human behavior, including pathologies such as autism.
Economic and social decision-making in rhesus monkeys
Dr. Alexandra Rosati, University of Michigan
This project will examine how rhesus macaques make decisions in order to understand the evolution of human-like economic behavior and self-control. Decision-making pervades human life, from assessing whether to save or invest money, to choosing whether to give into temptation and eat a slice of cake. These types of decisions often have parallels with wild behaviors, as foraging animals must assign value to different possible options, make trade-offs between costs and benefits, and deal with conspecifics who are trying to solve the same problems. As these complex skills often show significant changes across the lifespan in humans, we will therefore examine monkey decision-making across early development, adulthood, and aging in order to understand the ontogenetic trajectories of decision-making across species.
Rethinking complexity in facial communication systems
Dr. Jerome Micheletta, University of Portsmouth
Communication is a defining feature of sociality, and faces potentially offer others a wealth of information about identity, emotion and intention. Despite this, we know little about what makes facial communication complex, and how to distinguish between species that have sophisticated facial communication, and those that do not. Addressing these issues will allow us to better understand the evolution of complex communication, including our own. The aim of this research project is to develop and test a new m