Dora Biro
Principal Investigator
Dora Biro is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and subsequently held a JSPS postdoctoral research fellowship and a visiting professorship at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, Japan, before returning to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and later Professor of Animal Behaviour. Her research interests are centered on animal cognition and collective animal behavior, including navigation, tool use, culture, and collective decision-making.
Email: dbiro@ur.rochester.edu
Current Members
Mélisande Aellen
Post Doc
With a decade of experience in marine fish research with Professor Redouan Bshary at the University of Neuchâtel, I have worked at both the Gump Research Station in Moorea, French Polynesia, and Lizard Island in Australia. My principal methodology involved experimental testing of wild-caught fish under laboratory conditions. Additionally, I contributed to the development of new behavioral paradigms for cognitive studies of fish. My previous studies focused on individual cognitive performance. With this postdoctoral position, I will be able to examine cognitive performance at the collective level. I was drawn to the challenge of building a new freshwater fish laboratory facility to study rationality at both individual and group levels.
Email: maellen@ur.rochester.edu
Projects:
Collective Rationality
Samara Danel
Post Doc
I am currently conducting my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester and the Seneca Park Zoo on African penguins (Spheniscus demersus), with the goal of understanding how decision making is influenced by context (social vs. asocial). Since 2019, I have also been studying cognition (e.g., reasoning, flexibility, problem-solving, social learning, human-animal communication) in wild sub-Antarctic seabirds (i.e., skuas, sheathbills, Charadriiformes), integrating ecology and mechanisms to better understand the evolution of cognition (collaboration with Dr. Francesco Bonadonna).
Email: samara.danel@gmail.com
Projects:
Individual Reasoning,
Collective Navigation
Oviya Mohan
Grad Student
I started my PhD in the Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester in 2021 after finishing a bachelor’s in Physics at Amrita University, Coimbatore and a master’s in Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur in India. I am interested in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of coordinated problem-solving by exploring them across various species, including marmosets and humans. I also collaborate with Dr. Jude Mitchell on using eye-tracking methods to better understand social cognition that facilitates successful coordination. I take an interdisciplinary approach to my research and aim to incorporate deep learning and machine vision tools to study collective behavior in naturalistic settings. I also enjoy designing and conducting outreach activities that focus on sharing an interest in science with a diverse audience.
Email: omohan@ur.rochester.edu
Website: https://oviya-mohan.github.io
Projects:
Collective Problem Solving,
Emergence of Conventions
Rithwik Cherian
Grad Student
Hello! I am Rithwik, a graduate student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department here at the University of Rochester. Before joining the PhD program, I did a master’s in Cognitive Science and a bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering both from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. For my master’s thesis, I studied the emergence of basic color terms in heterogenous populations of colorblind agents using agent-based modeling. At the Collective Cognition Lab, I am working on studying cognitive and developmental mechanisms of collective navigation and cumulative culture in animal groups. I plan to use both simulations and experiments to comparatively study fundamentals of navigation and culture in different species. I am deeply fascinated by the research area of complex systems and hope to incorporate ideas of complex systems science into my research.
Email: rcherian@ur.rochester.edu
Projects:
Collective Navigation
Enana Jacob
Undergraduate Student
I am a class of 2025 undergraduate majoring in Neuroscience at the University of Rochester. I am working on tracking the gazing behavior of marmosets during trained collective decision-making tasks.
Projects:
Collective Problem Solving
Past Members
Federico Sanchez Vargas
Undergraduate Student
I majored in Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Rochester. In the Collective Cognition Lab (in collaboration with the Mitchell Lab) I helped design and implement markerless tracking of marmoset behavior and social attention during collective problem-solving tasks. I am currently doing a PhD at Emory University on wild capuchin monkey cognition, assessing individual variation in cognition and its relationship to social positioning (e.g. rank) and social learning strategies.
Projects:
Collective Problem Solving
Zebrafish
(Danio rerio)
Research Subject
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are tropical freshwater fish from South Asia. They are typically found in shallow, standing or low-current water. Their habitats vary with the seasons, and as a result they are well adapted to tolerating fluctuating conditions in their environment. Zebrafish have been widely studied in the fields of genetics, developmental, and medical research; however, over the past decade, they have also become a key species in cognitive and collective behavioral studies. The zebrafish’s relatively “simple” cognition and tendency to shoal make it a valuable comparative datapoint for our overall project, which aims to compare the mechanisms and outcomes of collective decision-making across species varying in levels of sociality and cognitive sophistication.
Projects:
Collective Rationality
Marmosets
(Callithrix jacchus)
Research Subject
Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are a species of small-bodied New World monkeys endemic to Brazil. They are cooperative breeders: they live in groups with an average of 8-10 individuals which usually includes only one breeding pair while other, older, members of the group help assist with raising offspring. This unusual social structure along with marmosets’ propensity for prosociality make them interesting models to study the evolutionary origins of coordinated behavior. They are also gaining popularity as model organisms in vision research, where they are studied in both controlled as well as free-moving, naturalistic settings within the laboratory.
Projects:
Collective Problem Solving
Image Source
Homing Pigeons
(Columba livia)
Research Subject
Homing pigeons (Columba livia) have been a paradigmatic species in the field of animal navigation for many decades, helping researchers uncover the cognitive basis of orienting through both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes. Centuries of domestication and selective breeding have increased the homing motivation of these birds (rather than their navigational skills per se), meaning that once they are taken to and released at a given location, they will immediately set out towards the home loft and return on as direct a path as they are able to compute, without delays or stopovers. As a consequence, we can evaluate their flight paths as the direct outcome of these computations, giving us uniquely clear insights into the underlying cognitive operations.
Projects:
Collective Navigation, Collective Rationality
African Penguins
(Spheniscus demersus)
Research Subject
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are sedentary birds that frequent the rocky coasts of Africa, from South Africa to Namibia. Despite their iconic nature, we still know little about how this species perceives and understands its world. Yet, penguins’ inherent attraction towards conspecifics makes them an ideal system to study the mechanisms that produce decisions at both the individual and group levels. In the wild, penguins breed in large colonies during the breeding season and fish communally at sea. At the Seneca Park Zoo, we exploit penguins’ attraction towards conspecifics as a motivator (reward) when assessing cognition at the individual level. We also study how decision making is affected by context at the group level. Since African penguins are red-listed as 'Endangered' (EN) according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), we also aim to exploit our acquired knowledge of penguins’ cognition and behavior to inform conservation practices as well as welfare in captivity.
Projects:
Individual Reasoning,
Collective Navigation
Humans
(Homo sapiens)
Research Subject
In addition to our research on a variety of animal species, we are also interested in studying how humans (Homo sapiens) solve some of the same problems to uncover the evolutionary origins as well as potentially unique features of these cognitive abilities.
Projects:
Emergence of Conventions