Do dogs get the point?

Juliane Kaminski
Roots of Human Social Interaction Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Human forms of communication seem to be unique. Research suggests that this is the case long before humans start speaking because humans are also unique in their use of gestural communication. One gesture of particular interest is pointing, a triadic, referential communicative act, which, as of yet, has not been found in other species. However, in recent years a large body of research has demonstrated that domestic dogs are proficient at following human communicative signals, e.g. the human pointing gesture to find hidden food. In fact, dogs’ abilities in this area surpass those of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Hare et al, 2002; Bräuer et al, 2006). This raises the possibility that dogs, like humans, interpret others’ intentions in this communicative interaction and that dogs also view these signals as a means to share information. This would challenge the hypothesis that this is in fact a uniquely human trait and is therefore an important empirical question. Here I discuss the latest research on dogs’ ability to use human forms of communication and raise an alternative hypothesis-the “command hypothesis” which states that dogs view human communication as directives telling them what to do and where to go. This is the perfect adaptation to the human environment in which dogs have been used as “social tools” to e.g. hunt and herd.

Male facial width and cooperation.

Michael Stirrat
School of Psychology, University of St Andrews

Men with wide faces (high facial width to height ratio) are more likely to exploit trust in economic games and are perceived as untrustworthy; others have shown that facial width also relates to physical dominance, aggression, deception, and cheating. I find also that facial width ratio relates to cause of death (narrower faced males are more likely to die from contact violence) which suggests that wider faced men are more physically robust.

In contrast to this picture of exploitative wide-faced men, recent work has found that variation in facial width ratio amongst Chief Executive Officers positively predicts the financial performance of the firms they run. Rather than this increased performance resulting from aggression or exploitation it may be that that these wider faced CEOs are more self-sacrificing. My recent work shows that wider faced males are more likely to cooperate with their group members when there is public competition with another group. This more nuanced picture of male physical dominance suggests that dominant males are predisposed to adopt cooperation strategies contingent on context, being exploitative interpersonally but self-sacrificing within the group.

Neural correlates of on and off-line actions: Implications for stroke rehabilitation.

Monika Harvey
Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow

Patients with hemispatial neglect exhibit severe visuospatial impairments in the hemispace contralateral to their lesion, yet whether visually guided actions are impaired is a hotly debated issue. Presenting a range of studies recently carried out in these patients, I will argue that action impairments may be the result of impaired off-line, allocentric processing. Such patients have difficulties in delayed and anti-pointing tasks, whereas direct (egocentric, on-line) reaching and grasping is relatively spared. Moreover using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM), we found that the anatomical areas critically associated with these deficits were located in the temporal lobes, areas distinct from those implicated in direct reaching and grasping. I will argue that neglect patients present specific action deficits only when the visuomotor tasks tap into more perceptual representations thought to rely on ventral visual stream processing and that the relatively spared on-line actions can be exploited successfully for rehabilitation.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Examining the Precariousness of the Glass Cliff

Michelle Ryan
College of Life and Environmental Sciences University of Exeter

While the ‘glass ceiling’ remains a barrier to women’s progress in the workplace, a recent program of research has uncovered an additional, largely invisible, hurdle that women need to overcome.  Extending the glass ceiling metaphor, we argue that women are more likely to find themselves on a ‘glass cliff’, such that their positions of leadership are risky or precarious.  A program of research conducted using multiple methodologies will be presented to illustrate the glass cliff including (a) archival research into FTSE 100 companies and UK general elections, (b) experimental examinations of underlying psychological processes, and (c) qualitative research into the explanations for glass cliff and the experience of women in management.

Virtual environments and autism

Thusha Rajendran
Department of Psychology, University of Strathclyde

Here I present work from two studies in which virtual environments have been used to investigate different aspects of autism (Executive Functions and Social Cognition). First, I will report a study using the Virtual Errands Task to investigated multitasking. We found that the adolescents with autism tended to follow the tasks in list order, rather than planning an efficient strategy. We also found that the autism group showed problems of prospective memory (remembering the intention to do something). Second, I will report ongoing work from the 'ECHOES Project' in which we created learning environments designed to provide the experience of joint attention for children. Early data suggests that the children with autism ascribe some sense of intentionality to the virtual agent.

A Gricean Minimalist approach to the evolution of human communication

Richard Moore
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology,  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

In this paper I propose an account of what I call Simple Communicative Acts (SCAs). SCAs have an intentional structure that corresponds closely to the one first described by Paul Grice (1957). However, the cognition required for their production and comprehension is less demanding than traditional interpretations of Grice have implicated - requiring neither a concept of belief, nor of the ability to entertain high-order meta-representations. Rather, speakers performing SCAs exploit lower-level embodied processes that, when combined, are sufficient for enacting Gricean intent.

Once the nature of SCAs is understood, it becomes natural to think that the communicative acts of children and also the gestures of great apes have something like a Gricean intentional structure. By taking SCAs to be a starting point for characterising the evolutionary trajectory from early hominid gestures to human language, we avail ourselves of an elegant tool against which to plot the emergence of the distinctively human aspects of communication.