Inside the lives and minds of animals
On a planet filled with millions of species, it is only natural to wonder what life would be like as a different animal. Although nonhuman animals can’t exactly talk to us about what they’re thinking and feeling, scientists have been able to peek into their minds through careful observation and clever experiments. What is it like to experience the world primarily through a sense we don’t often focus on, like smell, or through a sense humans don’t have at all? How does an animal’s perception of its surroundings shape its own sense of self? In this event, three experts come together from cognitive science, neuroscience, and biology to shed light on the rich inner lives of animals and guide us as we step into a completely different world.
Alexandra Horowitz, MS, PhD, Author and Professor, Sr. Research Fellow and Head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University, will begin by leading us on a journey that starts close to home as we venture into the world of dogs. Drawing from her bestselling books, she will share her research studying canine behavior and how dogs lead their lives nose-first, through their exceptional sense of smell. Dogs and their human companions visit her lab where they complete cleverly designed puzzles, games, and tasks, allowing researchers to watch what dogs do and get a glimpse into their mind. How do dogs formulate an understanding of themselves, their people, and our shared world through scent?
Nathaniel Sawtell, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, will then take us to a species that appears much more alien: the electric fish. Living in very muddy waters makes seeing with eyes a challenge. However, these fish have a sensory superpower that allows them to “see” their environment and each other by sending and detecting electric signals. What is the neural circuitry that allows these fish to process this type of information? By studying the brain and behavior of the electric fish, Dr. Sawtell’s research reveals how an animal’s sensory world can shape its approach to learning, making decisions, and thriving in its environment.
Following the two talks, Jessica Zung, PhD, Kanzer Postdoctoral Fellow in the the lab of Dr. Gwyneth Card at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, will moderate a discussion and Q&A with the speakers. Audience questions are welcomed, either submitted during registration or live during the event.
About the experts:
Alexandra Horowitz, MS, PhD, is an Author and Professor, Sr. Research Fellow, and Head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University. Dr. Horowitz is a researcher and professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, studying the behavior and mind of pet dogs. She has long been interested in understanding the umwelt of another animal, and her research and writing is aimed to answer the question of what it is like to be a dog. She has written five books, including Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, a New York Times bestseller, and, most recently, The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She earned her Master's and Doctoral degrees in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, and her Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
Nathaniel Sawtell, PhD, received a PhD from Brown University where he worked with Mark Bear on understanding how experience shapes the circuitry of the visual cortex in adult mice. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at Oregon Health and Science University with Curtis Bell where he began working on the sensory and motor systems of weakly electric fish. Dr. Sawtell is currently a Professor of Neuroscience at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. The goal of his research is to link the properties of neural circuits to their functions using experimental, computational, and comparative approaches. In particular, the lab focuses on understanding how cerebellar circuitry in electric fish and mice generate predictions of the sensory consequences of action.
Jessica Zung, PhD, is a Kanzer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Card Lab at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. She caught the research bug as an undergraduate studying bumble bee behavior and distribution at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado and has been fascinated by insect behavior ever since. During her PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, she studied the evolution of human-specialist mosquitoes, focusing on the chemistry of human and animal odors. As a postdoc, Dr. Zung has switched her research focus from mosquito olfaction to fly vision. She is exploring how visual information is processed by special feature-detecting neurons and their downstream partners. Throughout her scientific career, Dr. Zung has been especially drawn to studying both the 'how' and the 'why' of natural animal behaviors, striving to understand their mechanistic basis as well as their ecological and evolutionary context.