Clint Sergi, PhD Candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at UW-Milwaukee, will present a talk about his research, entitled “Animals Are Smarter Than You Think.”

The tradition among behavioral biologists has been to assume behaviors are products of only the simplest cognitive mechanisms that could generate the behaviors. The result has been a general denial of understanding behaviors as the result of potentially flexible cognitive processes. Much evidence now exists that demonstrates this view of behavior is incorrect, but the study of behavior has remained largely unchanged. In this talk, Clint will make a case for changing the paradigm under which studies of animal behavior are conducted. He will begin by arguing that the traditional view of cognition cannot adequately explain behavior, nor can it be reconciled with the observation that brains are large and energetically expensive. He will then present three lines of evidence that demonstrate the old view of behavior needs updating: 1) The nervous system evolved before the divergence of extant lineages that have brains. 2) Brains have remarkably similar structure across distantly related taxa. 3) Brains operate on the same principle. Rather than creating individual cognitive mechanisms to produce individual behaviors, brains create representations of the world, and use these representations to guide behaviors. Finally, Clint will argue that the correct way to study animal cognitive capabilities is to consider cognition in terms of what brains do, what cognitive abilities would be predicted given an animal’s ecology and evolution. Studying animal cognition must also rely primarily on using behavioral experiments to understand what cognitive feats animals are capable of, and then determining how brains accomplish such feats.

The presentation will begin at 4:00 PM in Lapham N101 and via Microsoft Teams, preceded by an informal Q&A from 3:45 – 4:00 PM. If you aren’t able to join in person, you can click here to join via Teams.