If there are other topic areas which you find particularly interesting but which are not included below, please contact the Schools' Liaison Officer. In this talk I say something about what we mean by 'intelligence', how it is measured, and will discuss some modern evidence suggesting that intelligence is linked to both the biology of the nervous system and to the ways in which people behave in society. Inverse optics tells us how it is possible to go in the opposite direction, from an image to a description of the world that produced it. On the surface that looks impossible, but biological vision clearly solves it reliably and very fast. Recently an interdisciplinary effort, involving mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and psychologists, has begun to clarify how this remarkable achievement is possible.
Most animal groups can recognise their kin.
This presentation considers why animals should recognise their kin and how this solved a problem that Darwin thought fatal to his theory of natural selection. The many and varied ways that animals and humans can recognise their kin will also be considered. It is responsive to a variety of stimuli and can even learn prior to being born. This talk discusses some aspects of the foetus's world, how it develops, what it can sense in its environment, what factors can adversely affect the foetus and its future development, what the foetus can learn and the importance of foetal behaviour for later life. Social psychologists have long been interested in leadership processes, originally trying to identify universal characteristics of leaders, and more recently looking at styles of leadership and their effectiveness in different contexts.