NICKY CLAYTON, Professor of Comparative Psychology, Cambridge University
Back to the Future: the Development and Evolution of Mental Time Travel
Date/Time: 18th March 2010, 17:30 - 18:30
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As healthy adult humans, we spend much of our time reminiscing about our past and planning for the future: mental time travel is what we do for a living. In this lecture Nicky Claytpm addresses three important issues. The first is why this ability is an important part of our normal daily lives and why loss of it can be so devastating. We are not born with this ability, and so the second issue that is discussed is when it develops in healthy human subjects. Finally the argument is put forward that this ability is not unique to humans. Surprisingly, some of the most convincing evidence comes not from our closest relatives, the apes, but from a surprisingly smart, large-brained member of the crow family, the scrub-jay.
Nicola Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Clare College. She has always been fascinated by birds; their elegance, beauty, and showy displays. She is even more intrigued by their minds: for behind the quizzical beady look, lies a brainy bird. Professor Clayton is a zoologist-cum-psychologist, who studied Zoology at the University of Oxford. Her passion is science and dance and her research programme is on crow cognition. Crows have huge brains for their body size and she is curious about how their minds work. So by day she works with the crows, and by night their behaviour inspires and lures her onto the dance floor. In fact she spends most of her spare time dancing, practising or performing salsa and Argentine tango and a weekly jazz class. And now, as a result of her collaboration with Mark Baldwin and her appointment as the Scientific Advisor to the Rambert Dance Company, the two sides of her life have come together.
Archive Items Nicola Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College. She received her undergraduate degree in Zoology at the University of Oxford and her doctorate in animal behaviour at St. Andrews University. In 1995 she moved to the University of California Davis where she gained her first Chair in Animal Behaviour in 2000. She moved back to Cambridge and in 2005 she was appointed to a personal Chair, becoming the first female professorial university teaching officer in her department and one of the youngest female professors in the university. Her expertise lies in the contemporary study of animal cognition, integrating a knowledge of both biology and psychology to introduce new ways of thinking about key issues in comparative cognition. She has also pioneered new procedures for the experimental study of episodic memory and future planning, which have had a major impact on our understanding not only of animal cognition but also of its relationship to human memory and cognition, and how and when these abilities develop in young children. She is also the Scientific Advisor to the Rambert Dance Company.
