Higher Cognition in Animals: participants
Lesley Rogers
Prof Lesley Rogers FAAProfessor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour
University of New England
Armidale, NSW, Australia
Lesley Rogers is Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at the University of New England in Armidale. She obtained a BSc in zoology from Adelaide University and a DPhil and PhD from the University of Sussex in the UK. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and has served on its council. Her research on the development and evolution of brain and behaviour, with a focus on hemispheric specialisation (lateralisation), is well known and she has published over 200 scientific papers and book chapters, as well as 14 books. Her discovery of lateralisation in the brain showed that it is not a unique characteristic of humans.
Patrick Bateson
Patrick Bateson was Professor of Ethology at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2005 and was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1988 to 2003. He was formerly Director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge and later Head of the Department of Zoology. He was Vice-Chairman of the Museums and Galleries Commission and in 2004 was elected President of the Zoological Society of London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1983 and was its Biological Secretary and Vice-President from 1998 to 2003. He was knighted in 2003. He is a member of Sigma Xi and a foreign member of the American Philosophical Society. His research is on the behavioural development of animals, and much of his scienti c career has been concerned with bridging the gap between the studies of behaviour and those of underlying mechanisms, focusing on the process of imprinting in birds. He has also carried out research on behavioural development in mammals, particularly cats, and has supervised field projects on mammals in East Africa. He conducted a research project for the National Trust on the behavioural and physiological effects of hunting deer with hounds. He has written more than 260 scientific papers and book chapters on imprinting in birds, the development of play in cats, the development and evolution of behaviour, neural mechanisms of learning, and the conceptual and methodological issues in the study of behaviour and animal welfare. He has also written articles on cooperation, the ethics of using animals in research, and the hunting of red deer with hounds. He has edited 15 books and is co-author (with Paul Martin) of Measuring behaviour (Cambridge University Press), and Design for a life: How behaviour develops (London: Cape).
Nicola Clayton
Prof Nicola ClaytonProfessor of Comparative Cognition
Department of Experimental Psychology Graduate Tutor and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological)
Clare College Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Cambridge
UK
Nicola Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Clare College, Cambridge. She received her undergraduate degree in zoology at the University of Oxford and her doctorate in animal behaviour at St Andrews University. Her research interests are in the development and evolution of cognition and her work is mainly with members of the crow family (eg, ravens and jays), and comparisons between the crows and apes (including humans). She is on the editorial board of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Reviews and Public Library of Science One.
Nathan Emery
Dr Nathan EmeryRoyal Society University Research Fellow
Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour
University of Cambridge
UK
Nathan Emery is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his BSc (Hons) in neuroscience at the University of Central Lancashire and his PhD in neuropsychology at the University of St Andrews. He has also performed postdoctoral work at the University of California – Davis and the University of Cambridge, and was a Health Emotions Research Institute Scholar. His current research focuses on social and physical reasoning by corvids (scrub-jays, rooks and jackdaws) and apes (chimpanzees and bonobos). He is also interested in the relationship between brain and behaviour, and how our understanding of animal minds and behaviour can influence animal welfare. He uses an ecological and ethological approach to address questions of cognition based on the natural problems faced by animals. He has authored over 50 papers and book chapters, including papers in Nature and Science and has co-edited two books: The cognitive neuroscience of social behaviour (with A. Easton; Psychology Press, 2005) and Social intelligence: From brain to culture (with N. Clayton and C. Frith; Oxford University Press, 2007).
Russell Gray
Russell Gray is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His research spans four areas united by a strong emphasis on evolutionary thinking and principles: language evolution, animal cognition, avian evolution and philosophy of biology. His work on language evolution has pioneered the application of phylogenetic methods to questions about human prehistory such as the settlement of the Pacific and the spread of Indo-European languages. The research on animal cognition uses New Caledonian crows as a model for examining debates about the links between tool manufacture, cognition and cultural evolution. The work on avian evolution uses phylogenetic methods to answer questions on the origin of groups like penguins and Pelecaniforms and the evolution of their behaviour. Russell’s research on the philosophy of biology has focused on the nature/nurture debate and the role developmental systems play in evolution. He has been awarded a James Cook Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand and a Hood Fellowship from the University of Auckland.
Gisela Kaplan
Prof Gisela KaplanCentre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour
University of New England
Armidale, NSW, Australia
Gisela Kaplan is a research professor in the Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour, Faculty of Science, University of New England. She holds a PhD from Monash University (Arts), and a PhD in veterinary science from the University of Queensland. She specialises in vocal behaviour and higher cognition of animals and has conducted research on a range of species. Publications include over 250 research articles, 18 books, and countless contributions to magazines, encyclopaedias, documentaries and radio programs on animal behaviour. Among her books publications are several on orang-utans, and more recent book titles include Songs, roars and rituals: Communication in mammals, birds and other animals (2000); Birds: Their habits and skills (2001); Comparative vertebrate cognition (2003); Australian magpie (2004); and Tawny frogmouth (2007). Her books have won awards and high acclaim. Her research on Australian magpies is ongoing and she is currently investigating their song control system and the function of various song types. She is a life member of the International Primatological Society, member of the International Ornithology Committee, and member of the Scientific Committee of Eurasian Ornithology.
Allan Snyder
Prof Allan Snyder FRSDirector, Centre for the Mind
150th Anniversary Chair
University of Sydney
Australia
Allan is the Director of the Centre for the Mind, and holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind at the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, cited for his contributions both to vertebrate and invertebrate visual neurobiology and to optical physics. Allan is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Marconi Prize, the “world’s foremost prize in communications and information technology”, the International Australia Prize and the Royal Society’s Clifford Paterson Prize. Previously, he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Yale University School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at the physiological laboratories, Cambridge University. He has degrees from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College, London. Allan’s hypothesis that everyone possesses the extraordinary skills of autistic savants was declared “startling” by Nature. The New York Times said it was a “breakthrough that could lead to a revolution in the way we understand the functioning of the human brain”.
Mandyam Srinivasan
Mandyam Srinivasan holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Bangalore University, a Master’s degree in electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a PhD in engineering and applied science from Yale University, and a DSc in neuroethology from The Australian National University. He is presently Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of London, and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. His research focuses on the principles of visual processing, perception and cognition in simple natural systems, and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.
Giorgio Vallortigara
Prof Giorgio VallortigaraProfessor of Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology and Dean of the Faculty
University of Trieste
Italy
Giorgio Vallortigara is Professor and Chair of Behavioural Neuroscience and Animal Cognition at the University of Trieste, Italy. He is the author of over 150 scientific papers, most in the area of animal cognition and comparative neuroscience. He discovered the first evidence of functional brain lateralisation in the so-called ‘lower’ vertebrate species (fish, amphibians); he also worked on comparative cognition, in particular on visual perception of biological motion and spatial learning and memory. He has served on the editorial boards of several cognitive science and neuroscience journals and has been the recipient of several awards.
