I was invited to give three seminar talks this spring, at the Department of Integrative Biology at CU Denver, the Department of Biology at New Mexico State University, and the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin.
I had a great time visiting all three departments. It was especially fun to return to NMSU, to my old grad department, give everyone an update on the new directions my work has taken me in, and hang out in my old lab. And I spotted some feral parakeets when I was in Austin, which is always a treat.
In my talks, I’ve been focusing on the key question: What do animals know about the social structures in which they live? I present three approaches that provide insight into the cognition underlying social decisions: detailed analyses of parakeet social interactions, development of new tools to detect the behavioral signatures of social knowledge across a wide range animals, and agent-based models to predict conditions under which different types of sociality would evolve.
