What’s New?

Website update

Following the change of the Society’s name to ESLR, we are happy to announce our updated website: ESLRsociety.org.

Social Learning WTF

Scientific knowledge often is a privilege to those that have access to academic journals and conferences. Therefore, one of the workshop activities aimed at engaging with the most popular public online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The goal was to improve existing articles or create new ones for common themes and methods in social learning. The activity was more demanding than initially anticipated, mainly because important pages inadequately represent the current state of social learning research, for example, the page on social learning theory, and thus require much more work. Several participants expressed interest in coordinating future efforts to improve the quality of social learning pages. We call this effort the Social Learning Wikipedia Task Force. If you would like to take part in this effort, reach out to us!

Poster Prize Winners

At this year’s workshop participants exhibited posters with a broad range of questions and model organisms, including fruit flies, bats, capuchin monkeys, and chimpanzees, as well as humans. The posters were judged by Dr Ellen Garland and Prof Andrew Whiten. Dr Sabine Nöbel’s (Toulouse) finding of high conformity in the mate-copying behaviour of fruit flies, together with Murillo Pagnotta’s (St Andrews) analysis of gaze coordination in a human social learning task, were awarded a prize for Best Poster, while a special mention was given to Julia Penndorf (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology) for her meta-analysis challenging the theory of age-dependent social learning.

First Annual General Meeting

At the end of our two-day workshop, we held our first AGM, one of the most important meetings of a society. Aside from the general agenda points (annual report by the Chair, and annual report by the Treasurer), we also discussed and voted on the Society’s constitution, as well as the new name of the society.

2019 ESLR Workshop

We are very happy to announce that ESLR’s 3rd workshop will be in June 2019 in Leipzig, Germany. The workshop will be hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. For the latest news have a look at ESLRsociety.org as well as the society’s Twitter and Facebook pages.