Dr Gillian Forrester Seminar
On Tuesday 29 October we were delighted to present our guest speaker Dr Gillian Forrester who joined us from Birkbeck College to talk about “The Evolution and Development of Human Cognition”. As well as being the director of undergraduate studies at her university and an active researcher, she runs many outreach activities, including the recent ‘’Me, Human’’ exhibition at the Science Museum in London.
Her research activity is focused on comparative and evolutionary psychology. Some of Dr Forrester’s research interests include the relationship between early motor development and subsequent cognitive attainment in neuro-typical children and in children with neurodevelopment disorders as shown by her recent publications in, for example, “Handedness as a marker of cerebral lateralisation in children with and without autism.”
Today’s presentation focused on behavioural findings from human and non-human animal studies, on the origins and evolution of hemispheric dominances in communication and socio-emotional abilities in humans and other species.
Dr Forrester started by giving the audience both a biological and evolutionary overview of the brain. Through comparative psychology she outlined how alike we are to other animals, for example Crows show similar complex tool use. She also, however, emphasised our uniqueness in reference to us having the largest number of neurons in the brain that enable us to develop complex language and customs.
One of the notable topics discussed by Dr Forrester, that the audience enjoyed, was her research disproving the recent pop-culture proclamation that left-handed language lateralisation leads to right-handed dominance in approximately 90% of the population. She presented interesting findings to eliminate this unfounded initial theory. Approximately 3 million years ago, our ancestors used tools which archaeologists have concluded (via the left-over fragments of the tools) that the majority of them used their right hand to utilise the items. At this time, they had not yet developed language abilities which demonstrates that right-handedness cannot be caused by left-handed language lateralisation.
Another major talking point discussed in this seminar, was hand-mouth articulation. She enlightened us to the patterns shown by humans when picking up simple objects. The findings she presented to us displayed that our mouth mimics hand movement, for example when participants picked up smaller objects, they tended to pinch their face together; however, when lifting larger objects, they would open their mouth. This further lead on to expressing different noises whilst carrying out the task. They were asked to say ‘Ba’ when picking a small object and ‘Ga’ when picking the large objects. The patterns showed that this was very easy to do as the noises and mouth movement were congruent to their hand actions. When this was switched however and they had to make the opposite noise for their action, there were lots more mistakes as the hand and mouth articulation was not corresponding.
Dr Forrester and her other colleagues will be giving more evolutionary talks on subjects such as language and lust. If you have enjoyed today’s seminar or anything written in the blog, there are opportunities to attend one of her other interesting talks. More information is available at www.mehuman.io/psyched
