KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description:
Assessing mental activity from the material residues of behavior is a crucial and thorny problem for both archeologists and animal cognition scholars. Assessing the behavioral performance that is supposedly guided by such mental activity, and produces the material residue more directly (at least in theory), is however an earlier step that is not easy either. This goes frequently overlooked, for we tend to focus on cognition and its species-typical requirements. In this talk, I offer an overview of the inferential processes that we use to deduce behavioral performance from artifacts. My interest lies specifically in accounting for behavioral performance that exceeds the innovation capacity of a single individual, which has recently been proposed as an evidential criterion for cumulative culture phenomena.
Biographical note:
Chiara holds a Master´s degree from the University of Milan and has been working on her PhD thesis "The Evolutionary Role of Imitation in the Hominid Lineage: Time for a Reappraisal" at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand as well as at the Australian National University, Canberra. Having received a Writing-Up Fellowship from the KLI she is currently completing her PhD thesis.
