Research

I research how ecology and evolutionary history influence cognition and sensory behaviour.

I use insights from psychology and neuroscience to design experiments exploring the diversity of cognitive and sensory behaviours in animals. Comparing animals as different as insects and humans reveals how animals are uniquely adapted to their biology and ecology.

My research is multidisciplinary and combines psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and ecology to study behaviour. I use a variety of techniques as part of my research, including behavioural observations, experiments, and agent-based modelling of neural and evolutionary processes. My work combines diverse approaches to provide an integrative understanding of behaviour.

Pollinator welfare and responses to stress

Research in animal welfare has predominantly focussed on livestock mammals and birds. Approaches developed there have led to important ways of measuring cognitive and physiological indicators of welfare, especially in relation to emotion and mood in non-human animals. Apart from a handful of studies, these techniques have not been applied to invertebrates. Our research adapts techniques from vertebrates to the study of insect welfare. We are developing tools to assess and investigate the consequences of decreased welfare for pollinators and pollination. With Olga Procenko we investigated cognitive biases and emotion-like states in bees and how stress affects different aspects of their behaviour. With Sarah Scott we are beginning a new project funded by the Wild Animal Initiative to investigate cognitive biases and welfare in wild bumblebees. I am also collaborating on Beeing-Human, a Leverhulme Trust grant led by Prof Jennifer Richards at Newcastle University. On this grant, our interdisciplinary team across the sciences, arts and humanities, will be exploring new ways to look at emotion-like processes in insects and bringing out a new digital edition of The Feminine Monarchy, a 16th century book by Charles Butler on bee voices.

Attention-like processes and active vision in insects

Insect brains are orders of magnitude smaller than primate brains. Yet they solve several of the same visual problems that primates do – often with smart, efficient solutions. One of the most important of these problems is that of selective attention – choosing one target and ignoring the distractors, something that is vital for foraging or avoiding predators. With funding from a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship, Théo Robert and I are investigating how insects manage to do so by combining insights from neuroscience, psychology and ecology. The research will also investigate the role these attention-like processes play in pollination and in particular how pesticides might affect the sensory systems of pollinators. Along with Louie Yip and Mike Mangan and Opteran we are also investigating how bumblebees develop different active vision strategies to solve visual problems.

As part of this project I organized a free online symposium bringing researchers in bee cognition and agriculture together on September 8-9 2022. More details here: Bee Cognition and Agriculture Symposium

Stereo vision and prey detection in the praying mantis

Praying mantises are the only invertebrates known to have stereo vision. My research investigates how they compute stereo vision and how their mechanisms of stereo vision differ from those seen in primates. This has shed light on how nervous systems evolve convergent solutions to similar problems. It could also lead to the development of novel mantis-inspired depth perception algorithms. You can read more about my previous collaboration on this work with In collaboration with Prof Jenny Read and Dr Ronny Rosner here.

The evolution of self-deception and overconfidence

Overconfidence is a cognitive bias that has been implicated in financial meltdowns, disasters and wars. It can clearly have serious and dangerous consequences. What then are the evolutionary advantages that enable it to persist? Robert Trivers proposed that self deception could have evolved to facilitate the deception of others if it eliminates signals (e.g. stress) that reveal deception. This would then give overconfident individuals a social advantage. Dr Shakti Lamba and I are developing an empirical research program testing this idea in humans and other species. Our first findings are published here. My book on overconfidence is out on October 8th 2024