COST Action AFFECT-EVO Discussion Hour

On Tuesday, November 18th, the Global Research Centre for Diverse Intelligences (GRCDI) will host a presentation and discussion on the progress of COST Action AFFECT-EVO and the challenges faced so far, led by Dr Tom Smulders from Newcastle University.

This event is open to all, and will be of particular interest to those looking to work with animals or who are interested in improving welfare through an understanding of non-human animal’s affective states.

The event will run from 2:00pm to 4:00pm in BWD:09 with tea and coffee available beforehand from 1:30pm.

As part of our commitment to make events run by the GRCDI accessible to our global members, this event will also be open to join and participate online. More details of how to access the stream and participate will be shared closer to the event.

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AFFECT-EVO brings together an interdisciplinary network of scholars in philosophy, psychology, humanities, social, computational, and natural sciences, with relevant stakeholders from industry, advocacy organizations, and governments.

This network applies an evolutionary framework to identify gaps in our knowledge about affective states in non-human animals, in order to guide future research and provide a basis for developing strategies to reliably generalize knowledge about affective states across species.

By doing this, they aim to develop better methods to assess affective states to improve animal welfare, and develop better treatments for both animal and human affective disorders.

They also explore how the public and policy makers engage with the concept of affective states in animals and how this interacts with the implementation of new laws and policies that affect animals.

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Tom Smulders is Reader in Evolutionary Neuroscience at Newcastle University. His research career has focused mostly on the avian hippocampal formation (HF) and its evolution. He originally studied the avian HF in a comparative cognition context, trying to understand the evolution and function of the avian hippocampus in the context of memory for cache locations in Parids and Corvids. More recently, his work has looked at the avian HF and its function in the regulation of the stress response, and at hippocampal plasticity as a marker of chronic stress in the context of animal welfare. Tom was previously the coordinator of the Marie S. Curie Action European Training Network ChickenStress, and is now the Chair of COST Action AFFECT-EVO, which aims to look at affective states from a phylogenetic perspective.