Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast

Scientist and metal drummer Marisa Hoeschele received an honours B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada in 2006. After that she completed an M.Sc. and PhD in Psychology with a specialization in Comparative Cognition and Behaviour at the University of Alberta, Canada.In 2013 she moved to Vienna as a post-doc and built the budgie lab at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. In October 2018 she started her own group, known as the “Musicality and Bioacoustics” group, at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This institute has researchers from many different disciplines all studying problems in acoustics: however the first animal studies were not conducted on site until this year in April when the budgie lab was moved to the institute. Marisa studies how different animals, including humans, perceive and produce sounds. The broader goal is to understand where music and language come from and what other similar capacities might exist in the animal kingdom.Marisa is the first guest I've had on who had a pop filter on her mic.  That's neither here nor there but it's still a thing.We talked, of course, about how Marisa got into the field in the first place, a bit about Austria and, obviously about her work.  Her work is interdisciplinary and we talked a bit about how this sort of thing is important not just in animal cognition, but in any field.mp3 download

Woo hoo! This one should be fun. Partly because I'm talking to.a friend and colleague from Algoma University. Also because it will be only the second episode I've done face to face. Jenn Foote came by my podcast studio (OK, look, I have two podcasting studios in my house, because I'm me, so to be clear, she came to Studio B). and we talked about her work, her origin story, and other stuff.Jenn Foote completed a BSc. Honours in Biology from St. Mary's University, where her thesis research investigated how neighbour-stranger discrimination in song sparrows was influenced by breeding stage of females. She then moved up the road and completed MSc. in Biology at Dalhousie University where she demonstrated that Eastern song sparrows in NS share songs like west coast birds and unlike other eastern song sparrows. Both her BSc. and MSc. work was supervised by Colleen Barber. Jenn completed a PhD at Queen's with Laurene Ratcliffe where she studied dawn chorus communication networks of black-capped chickadees and demonstrated that males interact vocally at dawn and those interactions sometimes included three or more males. She then did a short postdoc with Dan Mennill at University of Windsor before moving to Algoma University in 2010. She then moved to Algoma University where her lab, the OVEN (Ornithology, Vocalization, and Ecology Network) has been studying vocal behaviour of northern Ontario songbirds. The OVEN does in fact study ovenbirds. mp3 download

OK, look, I won't lie, I do love talking to all of the people who have come on the podcast. But, there is one person I've been hoping to talk to since way back in Season 1. It's FIONA CROSS!Fiona got her BSc (Hons) in Psychology in 2001 before she began working with spiders and then she got her MSc (with Distinction) in Zoology in 2003 and her PhD in Zoology in 2009, with all three degrees being at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr. Cross first went to Kenya to work with spiders in 2006, and has been a Visiting Scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (in Kenya) since 2010. Her research interests include selective attention, working memory, expectancy violation, and problem solving by spiders. Fiona never used to think that spiders could be particularly interesting, but she has since learned that spiders can do many remarkable things that could keep a person awake at night.Dr. Cross has 46 publications, and her work has featured in many news sources including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC, The Guardian, The New Zealand Herald, and Radio New Zealand. Fiona is sorta famous really, to quote her 'I got a fright when I first discovered there is a Wikipedia page about me, and I had to sit down when I discovered that a video about me had been viewed 12,000 times in one day'.  (BTW, that fame is well deserved, she rocks).  As an aside, there used to e a wikipedia page about me, but it was deleted because I suck....She loves to communicate science, and has so far organized three of her own international speaking tours (one in the UK and two in North America). COVID permitting, she hopes to run a spider event for children at the Christchurch public library in October (the month of the year that arachnologists affectionately refer to as ‘Arachtober'). She's also keen on writing for all ages.You can learn more about her and her work at her website (www.doctorspider.net).mp3 download

Michael J. Beran is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State University.  He received his B.A. in Psychology from Oglethorpe University in 1995, his M.A. in 1997, and his Ph.D. in 2002, both from Georgia State University.  His research is conducted with human and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, capuchin monkeys, and rhesus monkeys.  He also has done research with bears, elephants, and robins.  His research interests include perception, numerical cognition, metacognition, planning and prospective memory, self-control, decision making, and language acquisition.  Dr. Beran is a Fellow of Division 3 and Division 6 of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Psychonomics Society.  He was the inaugural Duane M. Rumbaugh Fellow at Georgia State University.  He received the Brenda A. Milner award from the APA in 2005.  He has served as the President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Southeast Psychological Association, and the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology (Division 6 of APA).  He is the current Editor of Animal Behavior and Cognition and has served on numerous editorial boards including Cognition, Animal Cognition, Frontiers in Comparative Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Learning and Behavior, and the International Journal of Comparative Psychology.  He has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and contributed chapters to over 50 edited books and encyclopedia.  He also is the co-editor of Foundations of Metacognition (2012, Oxford University Press), the author of Self-control in Animals and People (2018, Elsevier), and the co-editor of the forthcoming Primate Cognitive Studies (2022, Cambridge University Press).  Mike gets 2 pics because I love this slideHis research has been featured on numerous television and radio programs and in magazines, including Animal Planet, BBC, New Scientist, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American Mind.  His research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Templeton Foundation, and the European Science Foundation.  In addition to the fun things he gets to do in his lab and with his students and colleagues, he enjoys beekeeping, hiking, paintball with friends (and enemies!), travel, and the occasional good bourbon.  And, of course, ‘Bama football.  Roll Tide.mp3 download

On today's edition of Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast, I'm joined by Aimee Sue Dunlap.  She is an associate professor of biology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.Aimee got her undergraduate degree in biology, history and English in 2000 from the University of Memphis and then her MS in biology from  Northern Arizona University in 2002 and her PhD in ecology, evolution and behavior from the university of Minnesota in 2009. It should be noted that I'm making a concession to American spelling here and should be commended...Oh we also talked hockey.  Including Liga hockey in Finland.Work in her lab focusses on the evolution of cognition and the adaptive value of cognition and memory, especially in bees.  We talked about her experimental evolution work, as well as her field and lab stuff.mp3 download

Today on the podcast I'm joined by Caroline Strang.Caroline is known for her work with bees, horses, dogs, and scarves.She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Toronto where she worked closely with someone you have have heard of, Sara Shettleworth.She then went on to work at the University of Western Ontario with someone else who has come up a lot on the podcast, David Sherry. Once she finished up her PhD she moved down to UT Austin and became a postdoc with Felicity Muth in their biology department.  We talked about her work with David on bumblebee vs. honeybee cognition as well as her stuff on reversal learning in bumblebees.  We also talked a bit about her work during her postdoc and of course other stuff.mp3 download

Only guest with a baseball scholarshipJeff Martin joins me on the podcast this week.  He's actually the first non psychologist on the show.  He's a biologist or something...Jeff attended Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU) from 2011-2015 on a baseball scholarship. He earned both a BSc in Health and Sports Science and a second BSc in Biology specializing in Natural History. Though they didn't have a traditional honours program, he did research under the supervision of Dr. Aaron Place investigating simple conditioning in reptiles – mainly snakes. He then moved back home to Canada to attend Western University, obtaining his MSc studying with Dr. David Sherry at the Advanced Facility for Avian Research. His Master's research focused on how birds respond behaviourally to changes in overwinter temperatureJeff continued at Western and obtained his PhD under the supervision of Drs. David Sherry and Yolanda Morbey. His research focused on caching decisions made by Canada Jays and what factors may influence site- and item-selection. Jeff has just started a post-doc with Dr. Mélanie Guigueno at McGill University in Montréal (Go Habs Go!), where he will be investigating male choosiness in Brown-headed Cowbirds, and the importance of ecologically relevant tasks in animal cognition and behaviour.Thanks to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music.mp3 download

Jenna was wearing PPE before it was coolYES THE PODCAST IS BACK!I'm really happy to be back doing these.  They take some time, so I waited until my next sabbatical.  Well, my next sabbatical is NOW.  Look, OK, I'm pretty psyched for this, but let's not make this all about me.We open up season 2 with Jenna Congdon, who is a postdoc at York University, working with Suzanne MacDonald (who you may remember from such podcasts as 'Spit and Twitches, the Animal Cognition Podcast').We talked some about her PhD work as well as side projects.  We also talked about her current work at the Toronto Zoo.Jenna started out her career as a biology student at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON.  Coincidentally, I work there!  She switched over to psychology, what the cool kids take, when she took an elective with a frenetic but brilliant intro psych prof (me).  Actually, I'm a bit of a hack, don't tell anyone.  After completing her honours thesis project with me she moved on to bigger and brighter things, working with Chris Sturdy at the University of Alberta.  She got her PhD in 2019 and has been teaching as a part time faculty member at Concordia University of Edmonton and at the University of Alberta.  She's currently working with Suzanne MacDonald, as I noted above. Look, I haven't written one of these things in a while, and, well, I'm out of practice...As always, thanks to Red Arms for allowing me to mash up their music in the closing theme, BUY THEIR MUSIC.mp3 download

Kristy's subjects seem to like her a lotKristy Biolsi is an Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Francis College in Brooklyn NY, where she also serves as the Director of the BA/MA Program in Applied Psychology.  She is a co-editor for the journal Aquatic Mammals, serves on the editorial board for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethical Behavior and Evolutionary Biology in Literature (ASEBL), is a co-founder of the Evolutionary Studies Collaborative, and is the co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Pinniped Ecology and Cognition (C-SPEC) housed at SFC.  She received her B.S. in Psychobiology from Long Island University, Southampton College in 2001 and in 2007 she received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).Her research focus was on marine mammal cognition and while at Long Marine Lab, UCSC, she worked specifically with the Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Lab.  Her current research interests are in comparative cognition, focusing on marine mammals, and she has two main lines of scientific inquiry; laboratory work that is conducted at the Long Island Aquarium and Exhibition Center in Riverhead NY investigating discrimination learning and categorization with two captive, trained, California sea lions and field work which consists of data collection from surveys and naturalisticobservations of the local wild harbor seal population.  We even touched on some theoretical stuff about animal morality.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music with the ending theme, buy their music now.mp3 download

Emma Tecwyn is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Daphna Buchsbaum’s Computational Cognitive Development Lab in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto (which is the school I went to, thus making Emma the coolest guest so far on the show). She does research in the overlapping areas of comparative cognition and cognitive development to answer questions about the evolution and development of cognitive abilities. Emma and a friendEmma has a BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Birmingham, UK. During her undergraduate degree she spent a year studying at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany, where she took classes in animal behaviour and primatology, which sparked her interest in animal cognition. She subsequently obtained an MSc in Animal Behaviour from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where she did research on grazing interactions between wild and domestic herbivores on a Kenyan game reserve. She later returned to Birmingham to complete her PhD on great ape physical cognition under the supervision of Jackie Chappell and Susannah Thorpe, where she focussed on whether orangutans, bonobos and children can plan sequences of actions to solve physical problems. She then spent a year in Amanda Seed’s lab at the University of St Andrews in Scotland working on causal sequence imitation and probabilistic inference in capuchin monkeys, before moving to Toronto in November 2014.Emma’s current lines of research include physical reasoning in dogs, causal sequence imitation in dogs and toddlers, and how different species and children of different ages weight and integrate their physical knowledge and social information. We talked about Emma's research, about the recent Conference on Comparative Cognition, and about the GTA Animal Cognition Group, which she coordinates.  Oh and how philosophy of animal mind is a thing.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music with the ending theme, buy their music now.mp3 download

Reggie Gazes is an assistant professor of psychology and animal behaviour at Bucknell University in Lewisburg Pennsylvania.Reggie and a pal, wondering why Hampton won't do the podcastReggie has a BS from Bucknell in Animal Behaviour and a PhD from Emory University where she worked under the supervision of Rob Hampton.  I first met Reggie at CO3 a few years back through Rob.  Rob and I were students in Sara Shettleworth's lab in the 90s.  (As usual, I can turn any of these posts into posts about me).  Reggie later did a postdoc at Zoo Atlanta.Her work looks at the evolutionary roots of behaviour and cognition using a comparative approach.  She and her students look at things like memory, space and magnitude in four different species of primates (capuchin and squirrel monkeys as well as Hamadryas baboons and lion tailed macaques).  The social housing they use allows them to look at social stuff as well.We talked about her work about transitive inference in infants and monkeys as well as a bunch of other stuff.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music with the ending theme, buy their music now. mp3 download

Hey look, it's Eric's Facebook pic!Eric Legge is a part time instructor at the University of Alberta and at McEwan University, both in Edmonton Alberta.Look, I've known Eric since he was 17.  I taught him intro psych at the Memorial University of Newfoundland's Genfell campus in Corner Brook, and he worked in my lab while there.  Indeed, I am pretty sure that was the highlight of his career and everything after that was downhill.Actually, Eric went on to grad school at the University of Alberta and worked with Marcia Spetch.  (I may have written him a letter of recommendation for that, one sec...)  Yes I did write him a letter, in that I told the story of Eric carrying around a little notebook called 'research ideas' everywhere.  One day in my learning class he and I got into a discussion and we designed three experiments.  Then we both realized we had lost the class and I went back to talking about the Rescorla-Wagner model.We talked about Eric's work on searching for hidden objects in adult humans, his very cool ant navigation stuff and his early stuff on the hierarchical organization of cues in pigeons (I think I was reviewer B on that one...)Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme, buy their music now.mp3 download

Thomas Zentall is a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.Tom, the pigeon whispererTom's research interests focus on cognitive behaviours in animals including memory strategies, concept learning, and social learning. The approach Tom and his students  use is to define a cognitive behaviour that is characteristic of humans in a way that clearly distinguishes it from simple associative (SR) learning and then to examine the conditions under which it can be found in animals. This approach not only examines the relatively unexplored repertoire of animal behaviour that has been thought to distinguish humans from other animals, but it also develops relatively simple training techniques that may be useful in training developmentally delayed and learning disabled humans to use concepts and strategies. Tom has contributed a great deal to the field of comparative cognition, so much so that the Comparative Cognitiion Society had him give the master lecture at CO3 in 2014.Thanks to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme, buy their music nowmp3 download

Edward A. Wasserman is a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa.Work in Ed's lab focusses on animal cognition and perception and the similarities and differences between humans and non humans in categorization, perception and memory.He's picking out the next story for the CO3 Facebook groupI could write this great long biography of Ed, but, you know what?  There is a great long biography of Ed online, so you could go read it!  (There's also Ed's wikipedia article, which some editor named 'dbrodbeck' wrote). Among other things it mentions that he started out as a physics major, that he spent a year with a major of 'undecided' (I love that) and that he has been interested in the big problems and little problems in animal learning and memory for 40 odd years.I first met Ed at a conference at Dalhousie University in 1989.  I was a lowly MA student in Sara Shettleworth's lab.  Sara sent me to this thing and it literally changed my life.  I got to meet people like Ed and Al Kamil and I realized that there was just so much cool stuff out there and that the range of problems we can look at is mind boggling.We talked about how Ed got into the field, his theoretical stance and how it relates to violins (really) and of course his recent paper about cancer detecting pigeons.Ed and his colleagues and students have been working on big questions like discrimination and categorization for a long time.  In 2015 the Comparative Cognition Society recognized Ed's work by having him give the master lecture at CO3.Thanks to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme, buy their music nowmp3 download 

She once drew on the back of my neck for no reasonSuzanne E.MacDonald is a professor in the Department of Psychology at York University, appointed to the graduate programs in both Psychology and Biology.  She received her PhD in animal learning and behavior from the University of Alberta, and then did postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia, before moving to York in 1990.   In addition to maintaining an active research and teaching career, Suzanne has held several senior administrative positions at York, including Associate Vice President (Research), and most recently, five years as Chair of the Department of Psychology.   She has three main areas of research expertise:·      Memory and cognition (“how animals think”) ·      Psychological well-being of captive animals·      The impact of human activity on wildlife Her research is conducted both in the field, at sites in Kenya, Costa Rica and throughout Southern Ontario, as well as at the Toronto Zoo, where she has volunteered as their “Behaviorist” for over 25 years.   She served on the Zoo’s Board of Management and Zoo Foundation Board for several years.   She also served as a Board member for the Canadian Organization for Tropical Education and Rainforest Conservation (COTERC), and helped to establish a biological field station near Tortuguero, Costa Rica.  She continues to work in Costa Rica, as part of the project team to build a York facility in Las Nubes, near San Isidro.  Currently, she is a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Polar Bear Institute (www.polarbearhabitat.ca), and also a member of the Lewa Canada Board, a nonprofit foundation established to support the work of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (www.lewa.org) in northern Kenya.We talked about all kinds of cool stuff, including Suzanne's work with orang-utans, elephants and racoons.Follow Suzanne on twitter.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.mp3 download

Brett Gibson is an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire.Brett imagining a better year for Thomas VanekWhile he may live in Bruin territory he is a Minnesota Wild fan, and he received his BA in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1991, followed by his MS from Bucknell 1995 and his PhD at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1999.  (Brett also did a postdoc with my PhD supervisor, Sara Shettleworth and one with Ed Wasserman).Brett is broadly interested in the evolution of behaviour and cognition in non-human animals and the neurobiological underpinnings of these systems. He has two primary lines of research. In the first line of work Brett and his students are investigating the behaviour and cognitive abilities of non-human animals. In particular, they are interested how a variety of animals represent and plan movements in space. Their work in animal cognition also has included research on a wider variety of cognitive abilities, such as numerical ability, inference, and memory in birds, including the Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga Columbiana). In the second line of research he has been collaborating with other researchers in the neurosciences to use electrophysiology to record from individual/populations of neurons as animals perform cognitive tasks. This line of work has included investigating the neural systems involved in representations of space, as well as how different part of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex and thalamus are involved in planning actions and movements.We talked about what got Brett into the field in the first place, about working with people like Sara, Al and Ed, and about his lab's recent work on head direction cells in rats and on numerical cognition in Clark's nutcrackers. Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.mp3 download

Mike, the pole box, and a ratMichael Brown is a professor of psychology at Villanova University in Villanova, PA, which is just outside of the home of the evil Philadelphia Flyers.....Mike got his BA in psychology and philosophy at the University of Michigan and then went on to UC Berkley where he got his PhD in psychology.Mike's interests are in the general areas of comparative cognition and animal learning. He uses the results of behavioral experiments to make inferences about the systems controlling simple behavior and behavioral change. During the past decade, his efforts have been focused on spatial memory in rats and bees. Mike and his students  have studied rats in several laboratory procedures, including the radial-arm maze. They are interested in determining the nature of the representations and decision processes used in spatial tasks. Their bee research centers on working memory for spatial locations in honeybees and bumblebees. This work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation.We talked about a bunch of stuff including what got Mike into the field, working with Al Riley, and Mike's work on same different learning in bees and social learning in rats.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.mp3 download

Jennifer gets 2 pics because BATSJennifer Vonk is a comparative/cognitive psychologist with primary research interests in two overlapping areas: (1) animal cognition, and (2) cognitive development.  Dr. Vonk only likes animals that rhymeShe completed her undergraduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton ON, conducting an honors thesis in behavioral endocrinology, a Masters degree in human memory at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON and a doctoral degree on the topic of concept formation in great apes at York University in Toronto.  Her current work centers on social cognition, such as theory of mind, prosociality, and reasoning about emotions, as well as physical cognition, such as causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, numerosity, and natural concept formation. More recent work is focused on examining the effects of religiosity, attachment, and perspective-taking on human decision-making processes.We talked about some of her recent work including stuff on concept formation in bears, quantity estimation in gorillas, social and non social category discrimination, human emotion detection in domestic cats and kin discrimination in domestic dogs.(There were some feedback issues in this episode, I have cleaned up the audio best I could)Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now. mp3 download

Jon thinking about thinkingJonathon Crystal is a professor of psychology and director of the program in neuroscience at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.Jon received his BSc in psychology at the University of Toronto in 1992 where he worked in Sara Shettleworth's lab. He also spent a lot of time working with Ken Cheng as an undergrad. He then went on to grad school at Brown where he worked with Russ Church, receiving an Sc.M. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1997. Jon's lab focuses on the development of animal models of memory. His laboratory documented that rats may be used to model what-where-when memory and source memory.  He has also developed a number of innovative techniques for evaluating cognition in rats, including prospective memory, retrieval practice, and metacognition. The objective of the work in Jon's lab is to develop models of the types of memory that are impaired in human diseases.  Jon and I go way back, and we talked about all kinds of stuff including a bunch of his recent work on topics like source memory, practice effects on memory, prospective memory, episodic memory in rats, and just science in general.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now. mp3 download

Leslie, thinking about gene expressionLeslie Phillmore (follow her on twitter) is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Leslie received her BA (Hons) from Huron College at UWO working with Mark Cole.  (She also worked the summer between undergrad and grad school on some great stuff, and some not so great stuff when she ran birds for some postdoc in Bill Roberts' lab...)  She then went on to work with Ron Weisman at Queens University in Kingston for her MA and PhD.Leslie's lab works on song production and perception in zebra finches and black capped chickadees. They are particularly interested in immediate early gene response in perceptual regions of the brain as well as the effects of stress on neural development and neurogenesis.We talked about a couple of recent papers out of her lab and some stuff she just presented at SFN.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now. mp3 download

Valerie Kuhlmeieris an Associate Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, Canada.  She is the director of The Infant Cognition Group, a laboratory studying cognitive development in the first few years of life.Val is happy about her bookValerie grew up outside of Los Angeles, CA, but moved south to the University of California, San Diego, to pursue a BA and a BS in Anthropology and Biology, respectively.  There, she worked with Christine Johnson, a comparative cognitive psychologist who was studying gaze-following behaviour in bonobos at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park.  Exhibiting great dedication to the scientific endeavor, Valerie then left the sunny beaches of San Diego for the snowy winters of Columbus, Ohio.  There, she worked under the supervision of Sally Boysen at the Ohio State University Chimp Center, studying theory of mind and the use of physical representations of space such as maps and scale models.  She was a regular attendee of the Tri-State Animal Learning Conference and became a founding member (founding student member, that is…she’s not THAT old) of the Comparative Cognition Society. She then spent four years working as a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at Yale University in New Haven, CT.  Her previous research examining social-cognition in nonhuman primates formed a good foundation for her work with mentors Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom on cognitive development in young human primates, specifically infants.   She also developed an undergraduate course on Comparative Cognition and has been updating and improving it ever since.In 2004, she accepted a position at Queen’s University.  Her research program focuses on cognition from a developmental and evolutionary perspective.  Specifically, she studies the development of social cognition, including the recognition of others’ goals and needs (e.g., intention reading, theory of mind), the imitative and empathetic responses to those goals and needs, and the subsequent generation of prosocial behaviour.  She also continues to teach courses on Comparative Cognition, using a recently published textbook she coauthored with Mary (Cella) Olmsted. This one was a great deal of fun partly because we talked about big issues like theory of mind and where comparative cognition fits in the broader field of psychology.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.Mp3 Download

Laurie Bloomfield is an associate professor of psychology at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON, Canada.Laurie grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, and did her BA at Algoma University College (1996-2000). Based on some fascinating research she had learned about during several classes with one particular professor (Laurie claims this was me), she was the only student to conduct her Honours thesis study on animal behaviour (a trend that hasn’t seemed to have changed in years at AU). Also while at Algoma University College she was a teaching assistant in Psychology and the Assistant Manager and bartender for the T-Bird Lounge, which at the time was open all day on Thursdays, and students and professors alike met and enjoyed a beverage or two.Laurie Bloomfield, she's my boss....In 2000 she began work on her Master’s degree at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario with Ron Weisman. There she investigated vocal production and perception in chickadees, as well as learned techniques to explore the neural correlates of auditory perception. She received the Canadian Psychological Association Award for Academic Excellence for her Master’s thesis which examined in detail the morphology and phonology of the “chick-a-dee” call of the eastern Carolina chickadee, and the perception of this species’ call by the closely related black-capped chickadee. She then (2002) went to the University of Alberta in Edmonton to work with Chris Sturdy. There she continued her investigation of auditory perception in chickadees by examining the morphology and phonology of the chick-a-dee call of the western Mountain chickadee. Several lab studies that followed attempted to determine which acoustic features were most important to the birds in making species-specific discriminations. Immediately following the completion of her PhD (2007) she turned down an NSERC post-doc to start as Assistant Professor at Algoma University….  where it all began.Why continue to work with the chickadees? Well, they produce that chick-a-dee call that is a perfect model for understanding perception. It can be broken down into several components to determine what the birds are paying attention to, and perhaps then we can figure out why they modify this call. In other words, what are they trying to say? It’s sort of like attempting to learn another language.  Laurie and I talked about a lot of different things, her present research, her inspirations, and other stuff.  This one was fun for me as it was the first non Skype interview I have done.  Laurie is also the first woman I have had on the show, which is a long overdue thing.  Oh yeah, and she is like four doors down the hall from me at work....Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now. mp3 download

Aaron Blaisdell is a Professor in Learning & Behavior and Behavioral Neuroscience in the UCLA Psychology Department. He presides over the Comparative Cognition Lab, studying cognitive processes in rats, pigeons, hermit crabs, and humans.Aaron knows the best way to carry a rat is on your shoulderAfter receiving his BA and MA in Biological Anthropology (at SUNY Stony Brook and Kent State University, respectively), Aaron realized that animal cognition was even more interesting than dead humans. So he trekked on over to SUNY Binghamton for his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology with  Ralph Miller, where he studied learning, memory, and temporal cognition in the rat. This was followed by a brief stint as an NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow with Bob Cook, an expert on Avian Visual Cognition at Tufts University, where he learned how pigeons perceive and think about the world. In 2001, he emigrated to the climatological and cultural paradise of sunny LA where he has remained ever since.  A second interest of Aaron’s is in how human ancestry and evolution can inform us about health and well being in the modern world. He is currently studying the interaction between diet and cognition. He is a founding member and Past President of the Ancestral Health Society, Past President of the International Society for Comparative Psychology, an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evolution and Health, and a member of the Brain Research Institute, the Integrative Center for Learning & Memory, and the Evolutionary Medicine program all at UCLA.We talked about a lot of different things, including reasoning in rats, sensory preconditioning, how diet affects cognition, representation in rat memory and Aaron's crowdfunded research proposal.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.mp3 download

Noam Miller is an assistant professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where he runs the collective cognition lab.He's probably modelling something right nowNoam has a B.Sc. in Biology from Tel-Aviv University and – for some reason – also a degree in music (I suspect that reason is because he is a pretty good musician) . He did his PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto, working with Sara Shettleworth on geometry learning and with Robert Gerlai on schooling in zebrafish. For those of you scoring at home, I did my PhD with Sara and Robbie helped me load the moving truck when I left Sara's lab to move to UWO to do a postdoc. It is interesting how I can pretty much spin anything into something about me isn't it?He then did a post-doc with Iain Couzin in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University. He is interested in how being in a group shapes cognition, especially learning, and in zebrafish cognition generally.Noam and I talked about a lot of different things, including the mathematical model of spatial reorientation that he published along with Sara, his recent theoretical paper about collective learning and a pretty cool empirical one on the same topic. In all of this work you can definitely see the influence of the Rescorla Wagner model.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now. mp3 download

Happy MattMatthew Murphy is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, and will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at UMass Lowell this upcoming fall, teaching statistics and research methods.He earned his B.S. in Interdisciplinary Psychology/Biology in 2005 from Southampton College of Long Island University, mentored by Dr. Paul Forestell.  Research experience there included work at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, and work at Brookhaven National Laboratories on a NASA-funded project on radiation's effects on auditory cognition.Matt moved on to Tufts University in Boston where he earned his M.S. in 2009 and Ph.D. in 2014, both in Psychology, under the mentorship of Bob Cook in the Avian Visual Cognition lab.  His work with pigeons included absolute and relational control of auditory sequences, auditory entropy, rule-learning, spatial frequency perception, and intraocular visual memory.Matt's research interests include intraocular visual memory and self-recognition in animals.We talked about what got him into the field, why Bob Cook's lab is full of people who give great talks, about a life in science and his dissertation work as well as some of his recent stuff that he just published in JEP with Dan Brooks and Bob Cook.Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme.  Buy their music now.  mp3 download

Neil, telling us things at CO3Neil McMillan is a postdoctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of Alberta.  Neil completed his undergraduate degree (a BSc(Hons)) in 2007 with Angelo Santi at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON and then moved on to graduate school at the University of Western Ontario.  He completed his MSc and later his PhD (in 2013) under the supervision of Bill Roberts.  We have something in common there as I did a postdoc with Bill Roberts back in the mid 90s.We talked about a few things in this episode, including my bizarre inability to remember Neil's name for like the past 3 years. Of course we talked science too.  Neil is interested in spatial memory and so am I.  That said, no matter what, timing keeps pulling him back in.  He also is first author of a pretty cool review paper that you should check out.  We talked about hierarchical representations and cue conflict experiments as well, which I am quite fond of....His recent JEP paper with his two postdoc supervisors was another topic that we got in to, they have found an effect in reversal learning that you should read about.Finally, we also talked about the future of the discipline.Thanks again to Red Arms for the background closing music.  Buy their music now. mp3 download

Chris Sturdy is a professor of psychology and member of the neuroscience and mental health institute at the University of Alberta.Chris (far right) and the members of the Songbird Neuroethology LabChris has a BA in psychology from the University of Windsor as well as an MA and a PhD from Queens University in Kingston Ontario.He studies the neuroethology of song learning and more generally songbird communication. I was really happy he wanted to be my first guest on the podcast.We talked about a lot of different things including the influence that other researchers have had on Chris, the future of comparative cognition and the ever complicated world of gene expression in learning.Thanks to Red Arms for allowing me to mash up their music with quotes from a bunch of people in the closing theme. Buy their music. NOW.mp3 download