CICASP | Center for International Collaboration and Advanced Studies in Primatology

Join us on The PrimateCast as we cover the 74th annual congress of the Japan Society for Animal Psychology.

The PrimateCast rolled out its mobile podcasting unit once again to cover the annual meetings of the Japan Society for Animal Psychology between July 19-21, 2014. The society's aims are to support a better understanding of human nature, particularly in the realm of cognition, through the lens of the animal mind; in other words, its members study the cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals to give clues about the evolution of our own considerable mental abilities.

This year's congress was held in Inuyama, hometown of the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute (KUPRI), and notably was conducted for the first time entirely in English. The president of the organizing committee this year was Dr. Tetsuro Matsuzawa of KUPRI, and there were an impressive number of speakers from around the world invited to participate and present at this event. As such, Andrew along with summer intern Sofi Bernstein decided to get on over there and talk with as many of these invitees as possible.

In this the fourth of five installments we hear from Dr. Maciej Trojan speak about his work in lateralization of the animal brain. Topics of discussion include sensory and motor lateralization, possible evolutionary and ecological hypotheses for why brain lateralization exists and a bit about the context of his own work within Polish science. Dr. Trojan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Animal Behavior, Faculty of Psychology at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Click here to visit his academic page. We'd like to sincerely thank Dr. Maciej Trojan as well as all of our other guests on this series of podcasts from our coverage of the 74th annual congress of the Japan Society for Animal Psychology. Please do check out our other podcasts in this series, and make sure to browse our other podcast interviews with leading scientists in primatology and beyond.

Join us on The PrimateCast, and feel free to visit us at Facebook and Twitter and leave comments and feedback on this or any other podcast in the series. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

This podcast series was brought to you by CICASP, and was produced by Andrew MacIntosh with special assistance from summer intern Sofi Bernstein.