15 September 2022.
Welcome Brina!

Last week we welcomed Brina Recelj as the newest member of the ARED team. Brina joins us as Research Administrator at the University of Stirling.

08 August 2022.
Bridging the Technological Gap Workshop

Kirsten recently had the opportunity to attend a brilliant workshop called Bridging the Technological Gap held at the Primatenzentrum (DPZ) in Göttingen, Germany, to learn about cutting-edge tech to study human & animal minds.

25 July 2022.
ARED (E)SPP 2022 symposium
Last week six members of the ARED team travelled to Milan, Italy, to attend the 3rd Joint Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) and the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP). While there they enjoyed the fantastic program of talks and posters and symposia.

For ARED, day 2 of the conference was the most exciting as we had the opportunity to present the first symposium on the project! Giacomo kicked off the symposium with a talk titled ‘The relation between reflective and unreflective responsiveness to epistemic reasons’. Kirsten came next describing the experimental paradigm in relation to the philosophical framework and providing a glimpse of the developmental results so far. Masters student Kea Amelung who stepped up to give her very first conference presentation discussing the experimental work that has been done with pigs and dogs. Finally, Zsófia rounded off the symposium with a critical examination of the use of a social task to assess belief revision in animals and pre-verbal children. We had some excellent feedback and questions from the audience, so all in all the symposium was a great success.

21 April 2022.
Congratulations!
Three psychology students from the University of Stirling that have been working on the project for last few months are approaching graduation. Congratulations to Jennifer Boyd, Rebekka Lowe and Chantal Obro, we wish them all the best for their future careers!

14 April 2022.
A visit to Vienna
Some of the Stirling team recently returned from their first visit to Vienna to meet our colleagues at the Messerli Research Institute.
After more than a year of meeting only virtually, it was an excellent chance to properly get to know each other and find out how the comparative side of the research is progressing.
As well as this, Giacomo Melis and Kirsten Blakey gave talks at the Messerli which both sparked lengthy interesting discussions. Giacomo’s talk on 1st April was titled ‘Are humans the only rational animals?’ and followed a brief introduction by Prof. Ludwig Huber of relevant empirical research on animal cognition, summarised in his book “The rational animal”. Kirsten’s talk was titled ‘Developing Cumulative culture: A transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies’ and took place on 4th April.

19 January 2022.
ARED Workshop 1 was a success!
This week saw the first ARED workshop take place both in person at the University of Stirling and online. The presenters offered a fascinating series of eight talks, followed by fruitful and challenging discussions that raised more questions than they answered. We would like to thank everyone who participated for a fantastic three days.

Fingers crossed that the next workshop can be held in person in the not so distant future!

23 June 2021.
Metacognition: New developments and challenges conference
It’s conference season and it’s kicking off for ARED today with both Giacomo Melis and Kirsten Blakey giving talks at the Metacognition: New developments and challenges conference hosted by the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

May 2021.
A trio of talks
This month our PI Giacomo Melis gave not one, but three talks.
On 5th May he gave a seminar to the Behaviour and Evolution Research Group at the University of Stirling. On 18th May he gave a public lecture at a branch of the University of Third Age (Università della terza età) based in Italy. To complete the trio, on 25th May Giacomo presented at the Glasgow COGITO Work in Progress seminar.

4 May 2021.
Website launch
We are very excited to launch this project website. It will be updated with all our exciting news and the events we will be hosting over the next few years. Watch this space!

1 March 2021.
New project member
ARED gains a new team member as psychologist Dr Kirsten Blakey joins as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

1 February 2021.
ARED project official start date!
Today marks the first day of the 4 year long ARED project!

15 October 2020.
UKRI Future Leader Fellowship funding announcement!
It was announced today that philosopher Dr Giacomo Melis had been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for the ARED project. See the University of Stirling’s press release here.