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The Psychology Colloquium Series is pleased to present Psychology graduate student Camilla Cenni speaking on the topic of:
"Object Play: Is it really a step towards tool use?"
Tool use has long been identified as a hallmark of humanity. However, its developmental and evolutionary origins remain a puzzle for researchers from different disciplines. The Affordance Learning hypothesis holds that the perception of an object's physical properties determines its potential for manipulation, which in turn, affords the means for behaviours toward achieving goals. Although many scholars have argued that object play is a step towards tool use in animals, including humans, longitudinal, experimental, and phylogenetic studies do not currently provide a consensual answer on whether -and if so, to what extent - the expression of object play behaviour actually enhances the expression of tool use. In order to fill this knowledge gap, my PhD research project aims to further examine the developmental and evolutionary relationships between object play and tool use. To do so, I am using a combination of individual-based (both longitudinal and experimental) and cross-species comparative approaches to explore the processes underlying the correlated expression of these two types of object-directed activities across closely related species of macaques - a primate taxon displaying high propensity to manipulate objects. In this talk, I will outline my research plans and present preliminary results within three behavioural domains of tool use in Balinese long-tailed macaques: foraging, sexual, and social domains.
Greeting and refreshments at ~1 p.m.; talk at ~1:10 p.m.; discussion and question period to follow.
Contact: Dr Javid Sadr, Psychology Dept.
free to all campus community
Contact:
Javid Sadr | sadr@uleth.ca | directory.uleth.ca/users/sadr