Student Symposium 2025: The Social Brain

The Social Brain: recognition, communication, and learning in dynamic social environments

Speakers:  Erica van de Waal, Jo Cutler, Daniela Vallentin, Charley Wu, Josep Call, Michael Sheehan

Social interactions shape our thoughts, actions, and emotions. At the core of these interactions lies the ability to recognise individuals, communicate effectively, and navigate the delicate balance between cooperation and competition in dynamic social environments. How does the brain support these complex cognitive functions across species? This symposium will explore the neural, behavioural, and computational foundations of social learning and interaction across species. We will examine how individuals recognize and respond to social partners, how prosocial behaviours emerge, and how social information is interpreted to guide decision-making. By integrating insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, we aim to uncover the fundamental principles that guide how individuals learn from and influence one another.

The Student Symposium is organised jointly by PhD students of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. The event is open to all, not just students!

Provisional Schedule* 

*all timings in BST (UTC+1)

ABSTRACTS

Erica van de Waal – Exploring cultural inheritance in wild vervet monkeys
My research investigates how individuals learn from others and make decisions in complex, changing environments, using a mix of innovative experimental, observational, and physiological approaches. Two main fundamental questions have guided my research so far. First, I have aimed to better understand social learning biases in the wild, i.e., when, what and from whom do individuals learn. One of my most significant contributions in this area is to have revealed that individuals typically focus their attention on philopatric models, who are females in vervet monkeys. This directed social learning can lead to complex cultural dynamics at the population level, whereby different groups differentiate culturally over food preferences, not explained by local resource availability. Nevertheless, I also showed that immigrant males play a role in diffusing new knowledge among groups. Specifically, I revealed that even though immigrants readily changed their diet to conform to the preferences of their group, they can also trigger novel food acquisition of their group members when other food sources are scarce. Recently, I have been describing three major phases in the ontogeny of cultural transmission: a vertical transmission phase with infants learning from their mother, an oblique one with juveniles learning from other group members, and a horizontal one with immigrants learning from residents, and I am developing research to understand its role in shaping behavioural pattern at the group and population levels. The second research topic of intergroup group behavioural variation is a topic that has been neglected until recently, with more research focusing on individual or population-level variation. With my large longitudinal field site, I am uniquely placed to address this question, as evidenced by my publications on topics ranging from dietary preferences to sociality, intergroup encounters and intersexual dominance. Combining the results from multiple experiments and observations will much broaden our knowledge of the role of social learning for behavioural phenotypes in primates, which should help us to better understand what makes our human culture so unique.

Jo Cutler – Prosocial behaviours over time and across the adult lifespan
Prosocial behaviours – actions that help others – are vital for individual and societal wellbeing and addressing global challenges. In the real word, being prosocial involves multiple complex choices and learning processes that unfold over time. First, we can choose to find out what is happening to other people or avoid this information. Then we decide whether to incur costs such as effort to help and learn about the outcomes of our actions for others. I will present a series of studies that examine the neural and computational basis of these different components of prosocial behaviour using neuroimaging, lesion mapping and modelling. Our willingness to be prosocial can also vary over longer timescales. I will show evidence that prosocial behaviour increases across the adult lifespan but also becomes more selective.

Daniela Vallentin – Neural mechanisms of vocal learning and production in songbirds
Learning and executing complex motor skills relies heavily on sensory feedback and contextual cues.  In vocal behaviors, auditory input plays a crucial role throughout learning and mature production.  We investigate the influence of auditory feedback on vocal development and flexibility in songbirds. We examined the impact of female vocal feedback on song learning in zebra finches. Juvenile males raised with females exhibited more accurate imitation of tutor song features compared to socially isolated birds. Females also provided practice-specific feedback, increasing vocalizations as the young birds' song improved. Intracellular recordings in HVC, a key premotor area, revealed that female vocalizations modulate neural activity in juveniles during both listening and singing. These findings demonstrate the importance of female vocal feedback in song development and highlight how non-tutor vocal input shapes the neural circuitry of song acquisition. Furthermore, we explored the mechanisms stabilizing adult song, finding that inhibition within HVC closes the critical period by suppressing tutor influence. Reopening this period in adult zebra finches using a cell-type specific viral strategy allowed the birds to learn novel song elements, suggesting potential applications for enhancing motor skill learning and recovery.

Beyond developmental learning, we investigate real-time vocal flexibility in wild nightingales. We demonstrated that these birds can instantaneously match the pitch of conspecific whistles and pitch-controlled playbacks across their vocal range. This precise, year-round pitch matching suggests a stable neural substrate. The higher precision of prompt pitch matches indicates a direct auditory-motor mapping for online vocal replication.  Further investigation revealed that nightingales also adjust syllable durations to match playback stimuli. However, when presented with novel pitch and duration combinations, they prioritize either spectral or temporal  matching, constrained by their natural vocal repertoire. This reveals a novel dimension of vocal flexibility and potential trade-offs in real-time vocal adjustments during interactive communication, making nightingales a promising model for studying sensorimotor transformation.

Charley Wu – Social learning unpacked: the Representational Exchange Framework integrates policy, value, and model-based social learning
Social learning shapes our behaviour, helping us navigate complex environments more efficiently. Yet theories often treat individual learning mechanisms and social influences as distinct processes. I introduce the Representational Exchange Framework, which integrates diverse forms of social learning — policy-based, value-based, and model-based — under a unified computational hierarchy, balancing computational cost against flexibility and compositionality. I provide support across three studies. First, using a collective foraging experiment programmed in the game Minecraft, I combine visual field analyses with rich spatial trajectories to show how people dynamically integrate social and asocial learning mechanisms, where the degree of adaptivity best predicts individual performance. Second, I present a socially correlated bandit task to demonstrate how people flexibly integration social information about value, despite individual differences (e.g., preferences or goals). We demonstrate that our new social generalization model is the best normative model (via evolutionary simulations), while also providing the best predictions of human behavior across 2 experiments. Lastly, ongoing research employing a novel card task tests arbitration across policy-, value-, and model-based strategies, where with fMRI data, we provide new insights into how cost-benefit evaluations guide social learning decisions. Together, these findings reveal fundamental principles underlying adaptive decision-making across multiple levels of social learning.

Josep Call - On the quest for cumulative culture in nonhuman animals
The last three decades have seen a notable proliferation of studies documenting cultural phenomena in nonhuman animals.  Once the existence of nonhuman culture has been firmly established, researchers have turned their attention to the phenomenon of cumulative culture, which builds on the idea of culture but adds a repeated ratcheting innovation loop. In this talk, I will first explore some of the reasons why it has been so hard to find convincing evidence of cumulative in the wild or in the laboratory (lack of imitation, conservatism, task constraints).  Second, I will provide a conceptual framework for studying cumulative culture in animals.  I will present an operational definition, key processes, essential and desirable attributes and types of cumulative culture. Lastly, I will present our current efforts to document cumulative culture in two model systems (chimpanzees and ants). 

Michael Sheehan – Face cell analogs in a social insect
Social insect colonies are well known for their collective behaviours, less so the cognitive abilities of individual members. Paper wasps are social insects that form small societies that share a surprising level of individual behavioural complexity with vertebrates. One species, Polistes fuscatus, has highly distinctive facial patterns that they use for visual individual recognition. I will discuss some of the impressive social cognitive abilities of these insects as well as the ecological drivers selecting for social cognition abilities. Finally, I will discuss recent work from my group that has identified face-cell like neural responses in paper wasps. Like the face cells of primates, paper wasps have neurons that are selectively responses to images of conspecifics and encode aspects of facial pattern variation. Given that insects and vertebrates independently evolved object processing, the fact that both groups show similar processing at the neural level suggests that the neural codes are adaptive.
 

BIOS

Erica van de Waal
Erica van de Waal is a Professor at the University of Lausanne, where her research group focuses on social learning, cultural transmission, and the formation of traditions in wild vervet monkeys. She is also the Director of the Inkawu Vervet Project in South Africa, where she leads studies on the evolution of primate social behaviours. Through an ERC Starting Grant, her current research investigates how knowledge spreads within vervet monkey societies, with a particular emphasis on cultural transmission via male monkeys migrating between groups. Her innovative work aims to bridge the gap between observational and experimental approaches in understanding cultural transmission in primates.

Jo Cutler
Dr Jo Cutler is a postdoctoral fellow in the Social Decision Neuroscience Lab with Dr Patricia Lockwood at University of Birmingham. Her research uses techniques from neuroscience and psychology to understand prosocial behaviours. During her PhD in the Social Decision Lab at the University of Sussex, she focused on charitable giving and why people value the lives of others. Her research aims to answer questions such as: why are people altruistic? Which situations make people more prosocial? How do these decisions change across the lifespan? To answer these questions, Jo uses tools from psychology and neuroscience including fMRI, physiological measures, behavioural experiments, neuropsychological studies and computational modelling.

Daniela Vallentin
Daniela Vallentin is a Lise Meitner research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, heading the ‘Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication’ group. Professor Vallentin is currently exploring the neural circuits driving vocal learning and song production in songbirds. During her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Tübingen, she researched the neural mechanisms underlying quantitative reasoning in primates under Professor Andreas Nieder. During her postdoc in Michael Long’s lab at New York University, she moved to songbirds as a model organism for the study of precise motor skills and sequences. She started her research group in 2016 at the Freie Universität Berlin, studying the neurobiology of vocal communication.

Charley Wu
Charley Wu is a Group Leader at the University of Tübingen, where he investigates the computational principles behind human learning and cognition. He completed his doctorate in psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin before moving to Harvard University for his postdoctoral research, where he worked with Fiery Cushman and Sam Gershman. His research combines multi-agent games with statistical and machine learning models to explore how people learn under uncertainty, particularly in complex environments. Funded by an ERC Starting Grant, Dr. Wu studies uniquely human aspects of intelligence, such as compositionality and cumulative culture. In his upcoming role as a Professor at TU Darmstadt, he will also investigate how AI can adopt human learning strategies to become more flexible, efficient, and social.

Josep Call
Josep Call is a Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews, where his research focuses on technical and social problem solving in animals with a special emphasis on the great apes. He is also the Director of the Edinburgh Zoo Budongo Research Unit, leading studies on chimpanzee cognition and behaviour. After receiving his PhD in Psychology from Emory University, Josep researched social communication at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the British Academy, and his current research topics include causal and inferential reasoning, tool-use, and gestural communication.

Michael Sheehan
Michael Sheehan is an Associate Professor in Cornell University’s Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, where he explores the evolution of social recognition and signalling strategies in animals. During his PhD at the University of Michigan, he studied social recognition in paper wasps, and during his postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona and UC Berkeley, he expanded his focus to the evolutionary genetics of social signals in mice and humans. His current work integrates behavioural ecology, genetics, neurobiology, and evolution to understand how animals recognize individuals and how social interactions influence behaviour and physiology. His lab focuses on individual recognition in paper wasps and scent marking strategies in house mice.

SWC/GCNU Student Symposium Team

The Student Symposium is organised jointly by PhD students of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. This is the seventh instalment of an annual discussion-based event that aims to bring together neuroscience researchers from the UK and abroad to engage with current and future problems in neuroscience.