Members
13th
Term: Apr. 2023 ～
:Global Type
:Tenure-track Type
● Jie GAO Assistant Professor
Research Interests: Comparative Cognitive Science
Research Topic: Four-legged intelligence: how domestic animals see the world
Host Department: Wildlife Research Center
Previous Affiliation: Center for Information and Neural Networks, Advanced ICT Research Institute, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
Short Introduction
Humans have been domesticating animals for thousands of years. While many studies have focused on how domestic animals benefit humans, more research is rising on how they fundamentally perceive the world and how could humans improve their welfare. I plan to focus on domestic ungulates to systematically study their perception, and to compare them with their wildlife relatives. These investigations will elucidate how they perceive and adapt to the environment, as well as the function of the evolutionary and human factors on shaping minds.
More specifically, I am interested in studying perception for forms and shapes, social cue perception, and cross-modal perception. Studies on their form and shape perception will show the basic and critical properties of animals’ visual perception. Studies on social cue perception, e.g., perception for faces and bodies, will help clarify how they receive social cues from both humans and conspecifics. Studies on cross-modal perception will provide insights into how they coordinate information from multiple sensory channels and pathways. At the same time, I plan to compare across species to examine the effects of different physiological structures and domestication history. Together, these investigations will reveal intriguing areas of the picture of how domestic animals perceive the world, how they adapt to the anthropogenic environment, and how their mind is shaped by evolution and human factors.
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