Selection shapes diverse animal minds

Arnon 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. 

Daniel 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.

Alexandra 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.  

Martyna 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.

Zegni 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.

Aimee 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.

Barbara 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.

Dr 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.

Dr 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.