A magazine for early-career social learning and cultural evolution researchers
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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Language, more than anything else, defines human nature. Language appears to be unique in the animal kingdom and, thus, the question of how and why language evolved is one of the most fascinating research questions for me. However, it is not just human language that fascinates me but also vocal (social) communication in various social […]
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The concept of prestige in social learning can be difficult to address, and even more-so in the context of scientific practice. But a rumination of The Prestige as presented in Christopher Nolan’s film brings some resolution to conceptual tensions and inspires some real magic worthy of the term.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it a host of challenges for everyone. At Cultured Scene, we were particularly interested in how the pandemic and resulting quarantines and lockdowns have affected early-career researchers. We asked academics from different fields and at different stages of their careers the same six questions about how the pandemic has impacted them.
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