Lucy Aplin (University of Oxford)
Abstract. Do animals show cultural behaviour? Are these learnt behaviours inherited over generations? If so, how important is culturally transmitted information to the behavioural ecology of species? In this talk, I will argue that we should move beyond simply identifying potential cases of traditions and innovations in animals, and begin to apply a multi-level approach to understanding the interaction between cognition, transmission dynamics, and population structure. I illustrate this with a series of studies in wild birds, demonstrating how individual variation, social networks and population demographics all influence the transmission and longevity of socially learnt information. Finally, I highlight the further potential for cultural learning to act as a mechanism by which populations can exhibit rapid behavioural responses to changing environments, via the diffusion of innovations.
Brief Bio. I attended the Australian National University, then studied for a PhD jointly at the A.N.U. and at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Cockburn (A.N.U.) and Prof. Ben Sheldon (Edward Grey Institute, U. Oxford). My PhD investigated the social ecology and cognition of birds (tits, Paridae), and from 2014 I continued this work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. In 2015, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, U. Oxford, where I am currently based. More recently, I have also begun a new project as a visiting fellow at the Australian Museum, studying cognitive ecology in urban parrots.