Zu Gast an der RUB

Thomas Bugnyar ist für mehrere Wochen zu Gast in der AE Biopsychologie (Prof. O. Güntürkün).

Weitere Informationen nur auf Englisch:

Thomas Bugnyar is visiting Onur Güntürkün (AE Biopsycholoy) as a research fellow for several weeks in May, June and October this year. At the moment he is a Professor of cognitive ethology at the University of Vienna (Austria). Thomas received the PhD in 2001 by submitting his thesis on “Social cognition in ravens”. His habilitation thesis in 2008 focused on “Machivellian intelligence in ravens”. Thomas conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Vienna, at St. Andrews (UK) and the University of Vermont (USA).  Thomas Bugynar is one of the absolute hot youngsters in comparative cognitive science and, together, with Nicky Clayton the leading crow cognition scientist.

Within the workshop „Animal cognition“ at the RUB he is one of the key-note speakers on Friday, the 29th of June.
The title of his talk is

Social Cognition in Ravens – (When) Does Smart Behaviour-Reading Become Mind-Reading?

Abstract:

Dealing with a complex social world requires sophisticated knowledge about others, allowing individuals to predict, and manipulate, the behavior of potential competitors as well as cooperation partners. However, the ability of judging others’ responses may qualitatively different from a humanlike understanding that the others’ behavior is guided by mental states such as perceptions, intentions and beliefs. I here present a series of expermints on socio‐cognitive abilities in ravens (Corvus corax) that have been suggested to be linked with mental state attribution in humans (tactical deception, gaze following, perspective taking, knower‐guesser differentiation). Our findings indicate that ravens may be capable of reasoning about the others’ perception and support the view that complex socio‐cognitive skills such as precursors to a human‐like ‘Theory of Mind’ have evolved multiple times.