ERC Consolidator Grant · 2021
Testing for the universal mind using probabilistic inference
Is the human mind an evolutionary one-off? Or does it reflect a ‘universal mind’ in which similar cognitive mechanisms repeatedly evolve via convergent evolution? Avian cognition offers a powerful model system for answering this fundamental question about the nature of our mind, because birds last shared a common ancestor with humans 312 million years ago and have evolved brains with a very different structure. However, to unlock the potential of this model system we need to robustly test whether mechanistic convergence has occurred between the minds of birds and humans (the convergent mind hypothesis) and rule out cognitive similarities between birds and humans due to shared ancestry (the…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.