While prior work documents the individual and societal benefits of prosocial behaviors, less is known about how childhood experiences shape prosociality in adulthood. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a diverse and international sample...

While prior work documents individual and societal benefits to volunteering, less is known about how childhood experiences shape volunteering in adulthood around the world. Using data from the Global Flourishing Study, a diverse and international sample...

Behavioral contagion—the onset of a species-typical behaviour soon after witnessing it in a conspecific—forms the foundation of behavioral synchrony and cohesive group living in social animals. Although past research has mostly focused on negative emotions or neutral contexts, the sharing of positive emotions in particular may be key for social affiliation. This project investigated the contagion of two socially affiliative interactive behaviours, grooming and play, in chimpanzees.

The hypothesis explored is that collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and that an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales. The implications of this approach are outlined, as is the possible impact of tools from the field of diverse intelligence for regenerative medicine and synthetic bioengineering.

Recurrent neural networks are used to forecast time series in finance, climate, language, and from many other domains. Reservoir computers are a particularly easily trainable form of recurrent neural network. Recently, a “next-generation” reservoir computer was introduced in which the memory trace involves only a finite number of previous symbols. The inherent limitations of finite-past memory traces are explored in this proposal.