Comparative Cognition: Insights and Innovations Workshop - December 2005
Workshop Report
The workshop was held and was a great success. Attendance was excellent (>100 people) and included not only people from the Society for Marine Mammalogy but a number of primatologists as well. Audience participation was outstanding. Lots of interesting questions and lively discussion. Plus we were honored to have some of the greats in the field (Lou Herman, Ron Schusterman, Herb Roitblat, etc.) in attendance and their many comments and contributions helped put the contemporary work in perspective and significantly enriched the discussion.
Denise Herzing and I were also thrilled by the calibre of the talks. Several talks did reviews of large bodies of work and did so in a way that not only made them clear and comprehensible but also helped translate the theory and methods of the marine mammal and primate fields, which was a primary goal of this comparative workshop. As came up frequently in the comments, researchers from these two fields rarely seem to communicate and the primate people especially often seem unaware of critical, relevant work done with marine mammals. So this workshop represented a significant step towards redressing that!
The other important contribution it made, we feel, was from its focus on cognition in the "real world" of the animals involved. That is, the emphasis of all the talks was on the challenges the animals face in their daily lives and the types of cognition, and approaches to studying that, that arise in those contexts. Happily, this seems to be the direction comparative cognition is now headed, and so this workshop was traveling the leading edge of that movement!
Also, happily, Denise and I have been invited to edit a Special Issue of AQUATIC MAMMALS based on the work presented at the workshop as well as the key discussions that took place there. This should be out at the end of this year.
For more information on the workshop, see our website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~wdpdenise/
Denise Herzing and I were also thrilled by the calibre of the talks. Several talks did reviews of large bodies of work and did so in a way that not only made them clear and comprehensible but also helped translate the theory and methods of the marine mammal and primate fields, which was a primary goal of this comparative workshop. As came up frequently in the comments, researchers from these two fields rarely seem to communicate and the primate people especially often seem unaware of critical, relevant work done with marine mammals. So this workshop represented a significant step towards redressing that!
The other important contribution it made, we feel, was from its focus on cognition in the "real world" of the animals involved. That is, the emphasis of all the talks was on the challenges the animals face in their daily lives and the types of cognition, and approaches to studying that, that arise in those contexts. Happily, this seems to be the direction comparative cognition is now headed, and so this workshop was traveling the leading edge of that movement!
Also, happily, Denise and I have been invited to edit a Special Issue of AQUATIC MAMMALS based on the work presented at the workshop as well as the key discussions that took place there. This should be out at the end of this year.
For more information on the workshop, see our website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~wdpdenise/
Workshop Details
Chairs: Christine Johnson and Denise Herzing
E-mail:[email protected], [email protected]
Day/Date: Sunday December 11
Time: All day
E-mail:[email protected], [email protected]
Day/Date: Sunday December 11
Time: All day
Outline
We aim to provide both a forum for presenting summary overviews and illustrative examples of cognitive research conducted with both primates and cetaceans, as well as for the active discussion of theoretical and technological innovations that may enable us to further develop species-appropriate approaches. The two main areas on which the talks in this workshop will focus are the cognitive processes involved in foraging, and in social negotiation. The latter will constitute the main focus of interest, in part because it probably represents the primary area of overlap in these two groups. Plus, in appreciation of the link between social and cognitive complexity, and the related implications for human cognitive evolution, this area has become a particularly �hot topic� in contemporary cognitive research. In addition to our focus on social-ecological problem solving, we have also organized this workshop according to two distinct, but complementary, methodological approaches - observation and experimentation.