Nicky Clayton | |
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Born | 22 November 1962 |
Citizenship | United Kingdom |
Alma mater | University of Oxford University of St Andrews |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Comparative cognition |
Institutions | University of Cambridge Rambert Dance Company |
Thesis | (1987) |
Website |
Nicola Susan Clayton PhD, FRS, FSB, FAPS, C (born 22 November 1962 [2] ) is a British psychologist. She is Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge, Scientist in Residence at Rambert Dance Company, [3] co-founder of 'The Captured Thought', [4] [5] a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she is Director of Studies in Psychology, [6] and a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2010. [7] Clayton was made Honorary Director of Studies and advisor to the 'China UK Development Centre'(CUDC) in 2018. She has been awarded professorships by Nanjing University, Institute of Technology, China (2018), [8] Beijing University of Language and Culture, China (2019), [9] [10] and Hangzhou Diangi University, China (2019). [9] [10] Clayton was made Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology and Culture (CCISTC) [11] in 2020.
Clayton graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in zoology from the University of Oxford in 1984, before gaining a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 1987.
Clayton has made major contributions in the study of animal cognition as well as cognitive development in human children, with significant impact in the neurobiology of memory and overall cognitive development.[5] Her expertise in the study of comparative cognition integrates a knowledge of both biology and psychology in providing new methods of thinking about the evolution and development of intelligence in non-verbal animals and pre-verbal children. Clayton studies cognition not only in humans but also in members of the crow family (including jackdaws, rooks and jays). This work has challenged many assumptions that only humans can reminisce about the past and plan for the future, and that only humans can understand other times as well as other minds. [12] Her work has also led to a re-evaluation of the cognitive capacities of animals, specifically birds, and resulted in a theory that intelligence evolved independently in at least two groups, the apes and the crows, [13] and most recently cephalopods. This has also had scientific impact in changing the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill. [14] Nicky presented an edition of Between the Ears [15] entitled 'Year of the Covids' on BBC Radio 3 on 3rd April 2023.
Since 2009, Clayton has worked with the Rambert Dance Company as science collaborator, then scientific adviser, and now scientist-in-residence. [16] As a dancer, specializing in tango and salsa, she draws evidence from both the arts and science in her collaborations. In 2009, Clayton experienced her first collaboration by becoming involved in a dance piece called The Comedy of Change, which was inspired by Charles Darwin's ideas of natural and sexual selection. She met the choreographer and Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company, Mark Baldwin, and gave input about science that could inform the piece. [16] Other choreographic works inspired by science Clayton has collaborated with Baldwin on include Seven For a Secret, Never To Be Told, What Wild Ecstasy, [13] The Strange Charm of Mother Nature, The Creation, Perpetual Movement and Bold.
The piece Seven For a Secret, Never To Be Told was based on the psychology of children, an area of Clayton's research. Clayton singled out themes related to the behavioural development of children, such as the importance of play, which helped to inspire the choreography. This piece was another collaboration between Clayton and Baldwin; the title inspired by a line from the nursery rhyme One for Sorrow , which was based on a superstition associating the number of magpies one sees to prediction of one's future. [17]
Another of Clayton's collaborations is with the artist and author Clive Wilkins, who has been Artist in Resident in the psychology department at the University of Cambridge since 2012, a position created especially for Wilkins. Their collaboration arose out of a mutual interest in mental time travel and resulted in Clayton and Wilkins co-founding "The Captured Thought~ an arts/science collaboration." [12] Their work and lectures explore the subjective experience of thinking, by drawing evidence from both science and the arts to examine perception and the nature of mental time travel, as well as the mechanisms we use to think about the future and reminisce about the past. The goal of this project is to illuminate ideas concerning memories and question the power of analysis. [18] Important aspects of The Captured Thought's work have been highlighted in articles in 'The Guardian' newspaper in 2019 [19] [20] and in 'Die Zeit' magazine in 2020. [21] The Captured Thought were invited speakers at The University of Vienna's CogSciHub [22] inauguration 2019 and India's National Brain Research Centre 16th Foundation Day. Clayton and Wilkins continue to present their work in lectures to universities and conferences across the globe~ including UK, Europe, USA, Asia, China and Australasia.Their work together featured in the New Scientist Special Christmas and New Year issue 2022. [23] [24]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.
Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, jays, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers. In colloquial English, they are known as the crow family or corvids. Currently, 135 species are included in this family. The genus Corvus containing 47 species makes up over a third of the entire family. Corvids (ravens) are the largest passerines.
The Eurasian jay is a species of passerine bird in the crow family Corvidae. It has pinkish brown plumage with a black stripe on each side of a whitish throat, a bright blue panel on the upper wing and a black tail. The Eurasian jay is a woodland bird that occurs over a vast region from western Europe and north-west Africa to the Indian subcontinent and further to the eastern seaboard of Asia and down into south-east Asia. Across this vast range, several distinct racial forms have evolved which look different from each other, especially when comparing forms at the extremes of its range.
Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.
A mental model in psychology is an internal representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term was coined by Kenneth Craik in 1943 who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events.
The California scrub jay is a species of scrub jay native to western North America. It ranges from southern British Columbia throughout California and western Nevada near Reno to west of the Sierra Nevada. The California scrub jay was once lumped with Woodhouse's scrub jay and collectively called the western scrub jay. The group was also lumped with the island scrub jay and the Florida scrub jay; the taxon was then called simply scrub jay. The California scrub jay is nonmigratory and can be found in urban areas, where it can become tame and will come to bird feeders. While many refer to scrub jays as "blue jays", the blue jay is a different species of bird entirely.
Hoarding or caching in animal behavior is the storage of food in locations hidden from the sight of both conspecifics and members of other species. Most commonly, the function of hoarding or caching is to store food in times of surplus for times when food is less plentiful. However, there is evidence that a certain amount of caching or hoarding is actually undertaken with the aim of ripening the food so stored, and this practice is thus referred to as ‘ripening caching’. The term hoarding is most typically used for rodents, whereas caching is more commonly used in reference to birds, but the behaviors in both animal groups are quite similar.
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
The Crow and the Pitcher is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 390 in the Perry Index. It relates ancient observation of corvid behaviour that recent scientific studies have confirmed is goal-directed and indicative of causal knowledge rather than simply being due to instrumental conditioning.
The Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit is a branch of the UK Medical Research Council, based in Cambridge, England. The CBSU is a centre for cognitive neuroscience, with a mission to improve human health by understanding and enhancing cognition and behaviour in health, disease and disorder. It is one of the largest and most long-lasting contributors to the development of psychological theory and practice.
Christopher Donald Frith FRS, FMedSci, FBA, FAAAS is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He is also an affiliated research worker at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, an honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Mark Henry Johnson is a British cognitive neuroscientist who, since October 2017, has been Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Dr. Riley W. Gardner was an American psychologist who published works on individual differences and cognition.
Usha Claire Goswami is a researcher and professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and the director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Site. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Oxford before becoming a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at the University College London. Goswami's work is primarily in educational neuroscience with major focuses on reading development and developmental dyslexia.
Hamidreza Pouretemad is an Iranian neuropsychologist who is the founder and the Dean of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Shahid Beheshti University and Associate member of the Academy of Science of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Clive Wilkins is a British figurative artist. He is the author of The Moustachio Quartet, a series of novels that explore perception and the subjective experience of thinking; and with Nicky Clayton is co-founder of the Captured Thought, an arts and science collaboration. He is the first Artist in Residence in the Department of Psychology at The University of Cambridge, a position held since 2012. Wilkins, along with Clayton, was made Honorary Director of Studies and advisor to the China UK Development Centre (CUDC) in 2018. He has been awarded professorships by Nanjing University, Institute of Technology, China (2018), Beijing University of Language and Culture, China (2019), and Hangzhou Diangi University, China (2019). Wilkins was made Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology and Culture (CCISTC) in 2020.
Victoria Leong is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist whose research into the neural synchrony between mothers and infants has been widely reported. Leong's PhD thesis won the Robert J. Glushko Prize of the Cognitive Science Society in 2014 "in recognition of outstanding cross-disciplinary work integrating neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and computational modelling." She has a dual appointment at Nanyang Technological University and the University of Cambridge and is head of the Baby-LINC Lab at the Department of Psychology at Cambridge. She is a recipient of the 2020 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council.
Researchers study the reactions of animals observing humans performing magic tricks in order to better understand animal cognition. Using these studies, evolutionary psychologists aim to gain insights into the evolution of perception and attention by comparing responses of different species, including humans.
Anthony Dickinson, is a British psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Comparative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the highly cited monograph Contemporary Animal Learning Theory and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 for "internationally recognised contributions to our understanding of learning, memory, motivation and planning".
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