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Social learning in humans and non-human animals: theoretical and empirical dissections

01 - 02 July 2010 08:50 - 18:00

 

Organised by Professor Andrew Whiten FBA

This is a satellite meeting related to the ‘parent’ Culture evolves discussion meeting immediately preceding it and held at Southbank Centre. The Culture evolves meeting is focussed on the broad topic of culture, with social learning but one component of this. Talks in the DM will not necessarily be concerned with particular processes of social learning. Accordingly, the Kavli meeting is designed to home in on social learning processes, in a way that complements the Culture evolves meeting. Invited speakers are scientists who have been active in pursuing experimental or other empirical studies aimed at dissecting social learning processes, and in many cases developing taxonomies, theories or conceptual schemes for such dissection. Of the 16 speakers, 8 study children, 4 study human adults and 14 study non-human animals including guppies, tortoises, pigeons, quail, budgerigars, starlings, hens, keas, ravens, jackdaws, dogs, rats, marmosets, capuchins, macaques and all the great apes. As those familiar with the field will know, numerous controversies, from the terminological to the empirical, surround studies of social learning, and these are expected to make appropriate and timely topics for the kinds of scientific discussions now encouraged at the Royal Society’s new Kavli Centre.

Biographies and audio recordings are available below.

Organisers

  • Professor Andrew Whiten FBA, University of St Andrews, UK

    Andrew Whiten is Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the British Academy and of the International Cognitive Science Society. Through the last four decades his research has increasingly focused on the comparative study of social learning and culture, pursued through a combination of field research and 'lab' experiments spanning chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, several species of monkey, children and human adults. Antecedents to his editorship of the issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society corresponding to the present meeting include Culture Evolves (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2011, with Hinde, Stringer and Laland) and The Extension of Biology through Culture (PNAS 2017, with Ayala, Feldman and Laland).