Events

Recently, theories of consciousness have proliferated, partly because traditional empirical approaches focusing on neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) offer limited constraints. Unlike most traditional studies, which use binary paradigms (e.g., “seen” vs. “unseen”), a structural approach aims to characterize qualia and their physical substrates through relationships among qualia and between qualia and neural mechanisms. We present initial structural experiments and analyses that map properties of qualia (e.g., color, motion, sound, face) onto neural connectivity and activity. This framework may eventually yield a systematic catalogue of qualia–substrate relationships, akin to a “periodic table of qualia, ” providing a path toward addressing the hard problem of consciousness.

Life history theory represents one of the most important conceptual frameworks in evolutionary biology, and its role is potentially even more prominent in the evolutionary social sciences. This theory attempts to explain the differences between and within species in fertility, longevity and parental investment via the characteristics of the individuals (somatic, physiological, and behavioral) and characteristics of the environment in which they live. In this talk, we will discuss about the basic phenomena and processes that lead to the emergence of life histories: fitness optimization, evolutionary tradeoffs and environmental factors that affect adaptiveness of behavior. We will discuss evolution of life history trajectories via various developmental events like growth rates, puberty timing (e.g. age at first menarche), mating patterns (short-term and long-term romantic bonding), age of first and last reproduction, number of offspring, parental investment and ultimately longevity. We will describe the so-called "fast-slow" continuum that should explain covariations between life history indicators in the context of local ecological variation. The most prominent conceptual extension of life history, the pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) which explains coevolution of behavior, physiology, and life history traits will be presented as well. We will discuss the empirical findings including those that are consistent but also in opposition to the theory, describing the most important criticisms of life history theory in general: measuring life history in evolutionary psychology, problematic validity of continuum, and transferring hypotheses from inter-populational to inter-individual level. The aim of the talk is to show how life history theory, but also human behavioral ecology in general, can help us in gaining more comprehensive and in-depth insight into human, behavior, formulate new hypotheses about adaptive outcomes of behavior and reflect about potential future behavioral evolution. Furthermore, this exciting and intriguing area of research is based on a multidisciplinary approach and thus helps psychologists to connect with colleagues who conduct research in evolutionary biology, anthropology, demography and sociology: in this way we can obtain more complete, and therefore more valid explanations of intra - and inter-population variations in behavior.

Giovanni Parmigiani is an Italian statistician with degrees from Bocconi University (B.S.) and Carnegie Mellon University (M.S., Ph.D.). He is Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in the Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His work focuses on statistical methods in cancer genomics, contributing to a deeper understanding of inherited cancer risks and supporting informed decisionmaking

Various animal species can engage in socio-communicative interactions with humans, yet the factors that promote such behaviours remain under debate. Domestication, socialization, and species-specific predispositions may all play a role. To better understand how human–animal communication is shaped, it is essential to compare different species kept in similar conditions However, adopting a comparative approach when studying non-human animals, presents several challenges. Researchers must account not only for species-specific sensory and motor differences, but also for animals’ domestication history, motivational tendencies, and ecological background. Designing tasks that are truly comparable across species is particularly complex, raising questions such as whether experimental procedures should be standardized or not. In this seminar, I will address these issues and open a space for debate around the topic, by presenting a series of studies directly comparing the humanoriented communicative abilities of two domestic species—companion dogs and companion pigs— where our aim was to explore the factors that may shape emergence of such abilities