A magazine for early-career social learning researchers
Sven is an interdisciplinary social scientist currently enrolled in the MSc in Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Psychology & Economics. His interests span an equally broad range of subjects and methodologies including experimental moral psychology, formal […]
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I am a behavioral ecologist interested in a wide range of topics related to animal behavior and cognition, including culture, communication, and individual differences. I believe animal welfare is central to any study of animal behavior, and my research aims to further our understanding of animals’ experiences and behavior with the goal of contributing to […]
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I have always been fascinated by behavioural ecology. Yet, social learning became my main research interest only in PhD, when I started studying the use of heterospecific social information for breeding site selection in passerines. Since then, decision-making, social learning and personality differences are at the core of my research. Studying what drives within- and […]
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Humans have always been interested in the behaviour of conspecifics and other animals, but we now live in a time where we study behaviour and cognition as meticulously and systematically as never before. As an inquisitive animal watcher and passionate learner since my childhood, I consider myself as extremely lucky to study animal behaviour. I […]
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Applying for a PhD is often one of the first steps in a career in research, but it can be a very opaque process. Luckily for us, an anonymous author has offered a list of advice they wish they’d been given when they were making their applications. The advice is based on their own experience applying for PhD positions in the UK.
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When I started my PhD at the City University of New York in 2015, I had my heart set on studying the behavioral neuroscience of birdsong. The following year my PhD advisor, David Lahti, invited me to collaborate on a quantitative review of cultural evolution. This project was my first time exploring the diversity and […]
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The PhD viva (or defence) is likely one of the most stressful moments of many academics’ professional lives. What’s worse is that this rite of passage doesn’t even follow the same format across institutions or countries, making preparing for your viva even more difficult. Will it be a public or private defence? Will you make corrections before or after defending? Will you be faced with internal or external examiners, and how many? To shed at least a little light on the experience, Cultured Scene asked early-career researchers who studied in a variety of countries to explain how their defence worked, and to offer advice to students preparing for their own defence.
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Matthew Hasenjager talked to Cultured Scene about his recent findings that how individuals learn is conditional on group personality composition in guppies. The whole study by Matthew and colleagues has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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I actually find it difficult to write pieces like this one because my interests are very broad. I believe that any topic can be interesting if you take the time to understand it, and I hope to spend the rest of my research career bringing together my knowledge and experiences from different fields to find […]
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I just started a PhD in computational social science at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. My research focuses on so-called echo chambers, but I am also interested in fragmentation of online public spaces more generally. The idea of echo chambers is kind of intuitive, at first. They are metaphorical chambers on the internet that […]
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