All Episodes

#888 Elmar Unnsteinsson - Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference

Jan 18, 2024

Dr. Elmar Unnsteinsson is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin, School of Philosophy. He is also the Principal Investigator of two research projects funded by The Icelandic Research Fund, The Confused Intentions Project and Insincerity for Fragmented Minds, both based at UCD and University of Iceland, where he has a part-time position as a Research Scientist. Dr. Unnsteinsson works on topics in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, history of analytic philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of linguistics, and cognitive science. He is the author of Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference. More»
#887 Carol Ember: Tight and Loose Cultures, Sexuality, Gender Differences, and Cultural Databases

Jan 15, 2024

Dr. Carol Ember is President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University and the editor of the journal Cross-Cultural Research. Most of her research career has been devoted to cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, kin groups, gender roles, predictors of war and other forms of violence, but for the last eight years she has been working on cultural adaptations to natural hazards and other resource stressors. She is interested in research that integrates the fields of anthropology as well as anthropology with other disciplines. She is the first author (with Melvin Ember) of Cultural Anthropology, now in its 15th edition and Anthropology (with Melvin Ember and Peter N. Peregrine), now in its 15th edition. More»
#886 Randall Beer: Autopoiesis, Enactivism, Dynamical Systems, and Evo-Devo Approaches in Biology

Jan 12, 2024

Dr. Randall Beer is Professor of Cognitive Science and Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Beer's primary research interest is in understanding how coordinated behavior arises from the dynamical interaction of an animal's nervous system, its body and its environment. Toward this end, he works on the evolution and analysis of dynamical "nervous systems" for model agents, neuromechanical modeling of animals, biologically-inspired robotics, and dynamical systems approaches to behavior and cognition. More generally, he is interested in computational and theoretical biology, including models of metabolism, gene regulation and development. More»
#885 Paul van Geert: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Developmental Psychology

Jan 11, 2024

Dr. Paul van Geert is Professor Emeritus of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is renowned for his work on developmental psychology and the application of dynamical systems theory in social science. He is the author of A Dynamic Systems Model of Cognitive and Language Growth, Dynamic Systems of Development: Change between Complexity and Chaos, and, together with Naomi de Ruiter, Toward a Process Approach in Psychology: Stepping into Heraclitus' River. More»
#884 Maleen Thiele: Infant Social Learning

Jan 8, 2024

Dr. Maleen Thiele is a Postdoc in the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and group leader of the Minerva Fasttrack Group there. She is a developmental psychologist and infancy researcher interested in the psychological foundations of early social learning. In her current postdoc project, Dr. Thiele takes a comparative perspective studying the influence of observation-based social learning contexts on object-related memory across great ape species. A central methodological aim of the project is to develop robust eye-tracking paradigms and reproducible data processing approaches helping us to study ape cognition across species from infancy to adulthood. More»
#883 Jeremy DeSilva - First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human

Jan 5, 2024

Dr. Jeremy DeSilva is a Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage. He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and early human fossils in Museums throughout Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Dr. DeSilva worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human. More»
#882 Luiz Pessoa - The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together

Jan 4, 2024

Dr. Luiz Pessoa is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. Dr. Pessoa uses behavioral and functional MRI methods to study cognition and emotion (as manipulated, for instance, via the threat of shock), with an emphasis on the interactions between cognitive and emotional brain systems. He also studies interactions between cognition and motivation (as manipulated, for instance, via cash reward). An additional focus of his research centers on the development of statistical and computational tools for the analysis of fMRI data, particularly methods to link moment-to-moment fluctuations in behavior to single-trial brain responses. He is the author of The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. More»
#881 Marina García-Granero: Nietzsche, Züchtung, Biopolitics, Race, and the Übermensch

Jan 1, 2024

Dr. Marina García-Granero is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Valencia (Spain). She is a former postdoc from the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium), where she worked in 2022 as an Associate Member of an ERC Project titled "Homo Mimeticus." She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Valencia with a thesis on Nietzsche's concept of "breeding" or "cultivation" (Züchtung) in 2021. Her research and teaching areas are Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. More»
#880 Richard Redding: Sociopolitical Values in Psychological Research and Clinical Practice

Dec 29, 2023

Dr. Richard Redding is Ronald D. Rotunda Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Psychology at Chapman University. Dr. Redding's research focuses on forensic issues in criminal law and juvenile justice, the use of social science research in law and public policy, scientific evidence, and legal education. His work in these areas is both theoretical or policy-oriented and empirical. More»
#879 James Lee: Behavior Genetics, Educational Attainment, IQ, and Alcohol and Tobacco Use

Dec 28, 2023

Dr. James Lee is Associate Professor of Psychology, and a member of the Graduate Faculty of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Minnesota. In 2012, Dr. Lee earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. The papers collected in his dissertation cover causal inference, genome-wide association studies, and cognitive-experimental approaches to the study of individual differences. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Mathematical Biology Section of NIDDK/NIH from 2011 to 2013, working on problems in population and statistical genetics. More»