Uyen Tran

Supervision
Rana Esseily & Dalila Bovet

Phone : +33 -1.40.97.47.86
Mail : uyen.tran@outlook.fr

Funding
Ecole doctorale 139 : Connaissance, Langage, Modélisation
Contrat doctoral de l’Université Paris Nanterre

Social learning in social birds and in young children.
Social learning is an important capability for animals to adapt to their environment. To ensure that they learn a valuable set of information, individuals have to select a good demonstrator. Studies show that they look for different social criteria to select a good model (such as age, sex or familiarity) and that they tend to learn more from those that belong to the same social group. However, not much is known about the role of the species of the demonstrator in social categorization and in social learning.
This PhD project focuses on such questions: Do individuals see species as a social criterion for group categorization? Are they able to learn new skills from a different species?
To answer these questions, I will conduct my research on two phylogenetically distant species, cockatiels (Nymphicus hollandicus), a species of social psittacid birds known for their cognitive abilities, and children (4 years old). Through tool function learning, I will try to determine if cockatiels can learn from a human demonstrator and if children can learn from a cockatiel demonstrator. The aim is to see if they can learn from a distant species.
Secondly, I will also look at the role of the familiarity of the species by showing a dog demonstrator to the children to see if they learn more from a familiar species (dog) than from a less familiar one (cockatiel).  By crossing the criteria of species and familiarity, I aim to see which factor is hierarchically more important in children’s social categorization, and thus social learning.
Even if we are surrounded by many different species, we do not really know how we perceive them. The objective of this study is to better understand whether other species are seen as social groups by children, and thus making them eligible as models in learning. The comparative approach will give us a larger view on the emergence and the evolution of some capabilities of social learning in humans and non-human species, and whether those are unique to humans.

Dr Ildikó Király, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

• First year of Master degree: The effect of language and of ethnic origin on prosocial behaviors of 5-year-old children, under the supervision of Rana Esseily
• Second year of Master degree: The effect of consonant and dissonant music on prosocial behaviors of preschool children and cockatiels, under the supervision of Rana Esseily and Dalila Bovet.

Tran, U., Aimé, C., Bovet, D., Le Covec, M., & Esseily, R. Effects of consonant and dissonant music on prosocial behaviors of preschool children. 47th SFECA Conference, Gif-sur-Yvette, May 15th 2017.

Le Covec, M., Aimé, C., Tran, U., Esseily, R., & Bovet, D. Musical influences on cockatiels’ behaviors. 47th SFECA Conference, Gif-sur-Yvette, May 15th 2017.

Tran, U., Bovet, D., Aimé, C., Le Covec, M., & Esseily, R. The effect of music on prosocial behaviors of preschool children and cockatiels. Journée de la Fédération EPN-R, Université Paris Nanterre, April 27 th 2017.

Esseily, R., Tran, U., & Somogyi, E. The effect of language and ethnic origin on prosocial behavior. DUCOG (Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science Intuitive Sociologists), May 25-28 th 2017.