2019 FACULTY
ALISON
GOPNIK
UC-Berkeley
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My research explores how children create intuitive theories about the world, other people, and themselves.
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ANDREW
WHITEN
University of St Andrews
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My research focuses on the evolution of social learning, traditions and culture, which I study in human and non-human primates, especially chimpanzees.
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BRIAN
BRUYA
Eastern Michigan University
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I try to relate ideas from the rich wellspring of ancient Chinese philosophy to contemporary theories, spanning the fields of metaphysics, moral psychology, attention theory, and aesthetics.
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CHRIS
KUPENYE
University of St Andrews
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I am interested in the cognitive abilities that shape social complexity in humans and other animals, and their evolutionary origins. Focusing chiefly on humans and the other great apes, my work integrates theory and method from both biological anthropology and comparative psychology.
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DORIT​
BAR-ON
University of Connecticut
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One of my main current areas of research lies at the intersection of philosophy of language & mind, linguistics, and comparative psychology: understanding continuities and discontinuities between animal communication and linguistic communication.
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​ERICA CARTMILL
UCLA
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I study the acquisition and evolution of human language. My work bridges anthropology and psychology and involves both comparative and developmental approaches to communication.
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​JACOB
FOSTER
UCLA
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I am interested in the birth, life, and death of ideas. Fundamentally, I aim to understand the social world as constituted by, and constitutive of, ideas, beliefs, and practices.
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JESSICA
HAMRICK
DeepMind
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I study human and machine intelligence by drawing on machine learning to build new cognitive models, and by using inspiration from cognitive science to develop more sophisticated AI algorithms. My research focuses on physical reasoning, mental simulation, and reinforcement learning.
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photo credit: Urs Jaudas/Tages-Anzeiger
JOANNA BRYSON
University of Bath
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My principle scientific passion is understanding cognition. I have long used artificial intelligence (AI) models as part of my research method. Understanding how AI alters human societies is now one of my principle research areas.
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JOHN
TRUESWELL
University of Pennsylvania
My research is about language and thought, and the relation between the two. In particular, I study the mental computations and representations that support human understanding of the world and human linguistic communication.
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photo credit: UAB Divulga
JOSEP
CALL
University of St. Andrews
My research focuses on technical and social problem solving in animals with a special emphasis on the great apes. Ultimately, my goal is to elucidate how cognition evolves.
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JOSH
TENENBAUM
MIT
My colleagues and I seek to understand the everyday inductive leaps humans make in computational terms, which we apply to building powerful learning machines.
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KEVIN
LALAND
University of St. Andrews
My research focuses on the evolutionary origins of the human mind and culture, which I investigates through a combination of comparative experiments on animals and mathematical/statistical analyses.
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LUKE
RENDELL
University of St. Andrews
My research is largely centred around the evolution of learning, behaviour and communication, with a special focus on marine mammals.
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MALINDA
CARPENTER
University of St Andrews
I am interested in social-cognitive development in infants and young children, and in making comparisons between ape and human social cognition.
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MARION
FOURCADE
UC-Berkeley
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I study the new forms of social stratification and morality associated with the rise the personal data economy and the generalization of predictive analytics.
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MARTA
HALINA
Cambridge University
I conduct philosophical and empirical work in psychology and biology. I am particularly interested in nonhuman animal and artificial minds and the methods we use to learn about them.
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OMAR
LIZARDO
UCLA
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My empirical work contributes to several fields, including cultural sociology, cognitive sociology, and network science. My theoretical work deals with general issues in classical and contemporary social theory, with an emphasis on the link between practices, culture, cognition, and institutions.
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PETER
TODD
Indiana University
I study the evolved cognitive mechanisms that humans and other organisms (terrestrial or otherwise) use to meet the challenges posed by their environments, including finding and choosing mates, food, information, and other resources.
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​RAIA
HADSELL
DeepMind
I lead a scientific team at DeepMind working on embodied artificial intelligence. My research into lifelong learning and navigation advances the state of the art in machine learning algorithms and robotics while also enabling new opportunities to understand our own intelligence.
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​STEPHEN VAISEY
Duke University
The main goal of my research is to understand moral and political beliefs: what they are, where they come from, and what they do.
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SUE
HEALY
University of St. Andrews
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I investigate cognitive abilities in non-model organisms such as hummingbirds, zebra finches and bowerbirds and I am especially interested in 'animal cognition in the wild.
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TERRENCE
DEACON
UC-Berkeley
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I am interested in evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and how these different processes interact and depend on each other.
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photo credit: alexandrumunteanu.com
THOMAS
BUGNYAR
University of Vienna
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I am interested in social behaviour and the evolution of complex cognition. I pursue an integrative approach, combining concepts and methods of behavioural biology and comparative psychology.
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