 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

Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast

Episode 19 - Kristy Biolsi

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

Episode 18 - Emma Tecwyn

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

Episode 17 - Reggie Gazes

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

Episode 16 - Eric Legge

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

Episode 15 - Tom Zentall

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 

Episode 14 - Ed Wasserman

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

Episode 13 - Suzanne MacDonald

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

Episode 12 - Brett Gibson

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

Episode 11 - Michael Brown

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

Episode 10 - Jennifer Vonk

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

Episode 9 - Jon Crystal

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

Episode 8 - Leslie Phillmore

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

Episode 7 - Valerie Kuhlmeier

 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

Episode 6 - Laurie Bloomfield

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

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Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast

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