Episode 22 (Season 2, Episode 3) - Caroline Strang

Today on the podcast I'm joined by Caroline Strang.

Caroline is known for her work with bees, horses, dogs, and scarves.

She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Toronto where she worked closely with someone you have have heard of, Sara Shettleworth.

She then went on to work at the University of Western Ontario with someone else who has come up a lot on the podcast, David Sherry. 

Once she finished up her PhD she moved down to UT Austin and became a postdoc with Felicity Muth in their biology department.  

We talked about her work with David on bumblebee vs. honeybee cognition as well as her stuff on reversal learning in bumblebees.  We also talked a bit about her work during her postdoc and of course other stuff.

mp3 download

Episode 19 - Kristy Biolsi

Kristy's subjects seem to like her a lot

Kristy 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

Episode 17 - Reggie Gazes

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 podcast

Reggie 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 13 - Suzanne MacDonald

She once drew on the back of my neck for no reason

Suzanne 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 11 - Michael Brown

Mike, the pole box, and a rat

Michael 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 7 - Valerie Kuhlmeier

Valerie Kuhlmeier is 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 book

Valerie 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