My friend Ari Strandburg-Peshkin invited me to give a virtual seminar talk for the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour (a collaboration between the University of Konstanz and the co-located Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior).
It was a pleasure to virtually “visit” and I look forward to visiting in person in the future!
The evolution of decision-making, social cognition, and complex sociality
Abstract: In many social species individuals create their social worlds through interaction decisions and are then subject to and constrained by these social constructs, which can affect an individual’s future actions. Understanding how much individuals “know” about their social worlds is critical in understanding these potential feedbacks. However, it is difficult to determine how much information individuals have about the social structures in which they live. I present new methods that make detecting the presence and use of social information more tractable and serve as social assays to categorize the social dominance patterns used to direct aggression within dominance hierarchies. Using a historical dataset containing 85 species, I will show how new computational approaches can detect the presence and use of information and rank-based aggression patterns. These approaches, and a taxonomically broad perspective, provide new opportunities to investigate the effect of social information on individual behavior within conflict, and has the potential to provide rigorous evidence for the evolutionary patterns underlying social cognition.
You can view the recorded talk here
