Comparative Cognition Lab @ UC San Diego

‼️The CCL at UCSD is hosting the first-ever Detection Dog Trials in collaboration with MAN-K9! Join us March 8-9th to compete for trophies & prizes, contribute to scientific research, and showcase your dog’s scent detection skills! Learn more & register: detectiondogtrialsucsd.com

Thank you @UC_Newsroom for creating this informative and even handed representation of the challenges and opinions around pets pushing buttons to communicate with humans. See below a few papers we published. We have 3 more on the way (one about cats) youtu.be/cTnVSJ8V4wk?si…

I had the most wonderful time presenting @CCLABUCSD current progress on this project to the amazing @Interspecies_io community! If you could not attend but are interested in finding out more about our work, check out the lecture here: youtube.com/watch?v=RpjFuP…

Thank you so much for the invitation! Very much looking forward to giving the talk and engaging with your community!

Today (April 30th) is 🔱 #TritonGivingDay Please donate to support the students in the Comparative Cognition Lab studying 10,000 pets from 47 countries in the largest Animal Communication study ever attempted! We need your help! This is Parker tinyurl.com/2s3ksem2 @UCSDalumni

Less than a week away from our first ever Detection Dog Trials event with MAN-K9! We hope to see you there! 🐕🐾

The scent detection dog trials will take place on March 8th-9th in La Jolla (CA) at @UCSanDiego. Professionals and civilians will be competing on different days, judged by professional judges and receiving prizes. This is going to be a one of a kind event!

@CCLABUCSD is delighted to move into the amazing realm of working dogs and highly trained family dogs. This event will help us develop new tools to better assess and improve dog-handler communication and bond. Sign up here: detectiondogtrialsucsd.com and please RT @UCSDalumni

“The basic reasons why most people use language are the same reasons why most animals communicate.” @RossanoFederico explains the blurry line between human language and animal communication on “Babbage” econ.st/4hw5Jt1 🎧

Thank you for the opportunity! And if people are interested in signing up for the study they can look for more info and sign up here: cclab.ucsd.edu/pet-cognition-…

On “Babbage” this week, the first episode in a two-part series that explores animal communication and efforts to translate it in the age of AI econ.st/3EBFfrq 🎧

A few days ago I was asked by @kncukier "whether language is a cognitive ability that’s unique to humans, or just one of many modes of communication dotted across the tree of life". You can hear the conversation that followed here. Stay tuned for the second episode.

Thank you so much @svignieri and @ScienceMagazine for the shout out! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

After getting my dog I became fascinated by all the contradictory ways humans treat pets — for example, people who teach their dogs to use buttons to talk. I decided to see what was behind this phenomenon, culturally and scientifically, for NYT Magazine. nytimes.com/2025/01/06/mag…

There’s a long, grubby history of animals being trained to “speak” in ways that humans have claimed to understand. But, as @ImogenWK discovers, a new cohort of scientists is trying to decode how they communicate in their own environments econ.st/4fHnPqk 👇

A couple of years ago @BBC came to Laikipia, Kenya to film the olive baboon troop that @UasoNgiro has been studying for 50 years. You can now see the beauty of our field site in Episode 10 of the series The Secret Lives of Animals that just dropped on @AppleTV. Highly recommended

New article on how dogs are using their soundboards at home is finally out! Using a large dataset (250K) of button presses by family dogs and their owners, we show that dogs’ presses are (i) non-accidental, (ii) non-random, and (iii) not mere repetitions of their owners’ presses.

Thrilled to share AlphaChimp, our new end-to-end approach to detect chimpanzees positions and behaviors from videos: arxiv.org/abs/2410.17136 It bridges computer vision and primatology and it integrates temporal feature fusion with a Transformer-based self-attention mechanism.

Sometimes we interact with people who talk to us as if they know better (but they don't). This can be so frustrating that we tell our friends about it. In our new paper we analyze a "very human" type of narrative: narratives about epistemic trespassing. degruyter.com/document/doi/1…

Thank you @carlzimmer for covering our recruitment theory of gesture origins paper in @nytimes today! You can read the original manuscript here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/br… Why Do Apes Make Gestures? nytimes.com/2024/09/06/sci… @kirstyegraham @CARTAUCSD @UCSDnews @UC_Newsroom