Alex Taylor joined the Institute for Neuroscience of the UAB (INc-UAB) in March as an ICREA Research Professor. Starting in May, he will be working on his UNIPROB project "Testing for the universal mind using probabilistic infterence" thanks to a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
Taylor will be researching whether the human mind is a reflection of a "universal mind" in which similar cognitive mechanisms repeatedly evolve via convergent evolution. To do so, he will be using avian cognition as a model system. Birds last shared a common ancestor with humans 312 million years ago and have evolved brains with a very different structure. Despite birds showing highly impressive problem solving abilities in recent years, it is not yet clear if mechanistic convergence has occurred between the minds of birds and humans (the convergent mind hypothesis). To test this hypothesis the UNIPROB project takes advantage of decades of research on probabilistic inference, a central, but imperfect aspect of human cognition.
Taylor' research will examine if the same cognitive biases seen in the probabilistic inferences of humans are also seen in both the kea parrot and rats. If convergent evolution has occurred, then only humans and kea will solve these problems while showing the same cognitive biases and errors. By testing for the convergent evolution of this cognitive system, UNIPROB can generate conclusive evidence that probabilistic biases are adaptive features of the human mind and discover if there is a new frontier in cognitive science, namely a universal mind that evolves repeatedly via convergent evolution.
Alex Taylor studied Biology at Oxford University and obtained his PhD in Psychology at the University of Auckland in 2010. He then worked at the University of Cambridge as a Junior Research Fellow amd later took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland, where he was awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand both a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (2014-19) and the Prime Minister's Emerging Scientist prize (2015). He has published 79 research papers and has been cited more than 3,500 times.
