Hosted by the School of Psychological Science

Abstract: The last decade has seen a burgeoning interest in studying the neural and computational mechanisms that underpin social learning (learning from others). Many findings support the view that learning from other people is underpinned by the same, ‘domain-general’, mechanisms underpinning learning from non-social stimuli. Despite this, the idea that humans possess social-specific learning mechanisms - adaptive specializations moulded by natural selection to cope with the pressures of group living - persists. In this talk I explore the persistence of this idea. First, I present dissociations between social and non-social learning - patterns of data which are difficult to explain under the domain-general thesis and which therefore support the idea that we have evolved special mechanisms for social learning. Subsequently, I argue that most studies that have dissociated social and non-social learning have employed paradigms in which social information comprises a secondary, additional, source of information that can be used to supplement learning from non-social stimuli. Thus, in most extant paradigms, social and non-social learning differ both in terms of social nature (social or non-social) and status (primary or secondary). I conclude that status is an important driver of apparent differences between social and non-social learning. When we account for differences in status, we see that social and non-social learning share common (dopamine-mediated) mechanisms.

Bio: Jen completed a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Followed by postdocs at the University of Cambridge, the Donder’s Institute in The Netherlands, and a lectureship at City University London. In 2015 Jennifer moved to the University of Birmingham to set up her own research group with help from an ERC starting grant and studentships funded by the MRC and BBSRC.

Work from Jen’s lab covers a range of topics that fall under the umbrella term “social cognition” including emotional expression, emotion recognition, face perception, biological motion processing, social learning and decision making, imitation and theory of mind. The driving question behind all of this is what are the cognitive abilities that enable humans to have rich and cumulative culture? Using comparative studies - with honey bees - Jen’s lab also investigate whether other species share some of these abilities. Their work has attracted a number of awards including the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience early career award and a Philip Leverhulme Prize.