The natural pedagogy hypothesis proposes that human infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from others, facilitating rapid cultural learning. In this view, sensitivity to such signals is a uniquely human adaptation and as such nonhuman animals should not produce or utilize these communicative signals. We test these evolutionary…

The prefrontal cortex is larger than would be predicted by body size or visual cortex volume in great apes compared with monkeys. Because prefrontal cortex is critical for working memory, we hypothesized that recognition memory tests would engage working memory in orangutans more robustly than in rhesus monkeys. In contrast to working memory, the…

Two examples of mathematical modelling are explored. Firstly, optimising the distance travelled when jumping from a swing is discussed. The second concerns optimising the distance travelled by monkeys when swinging from branch to branch.

Data from the "Developing Indigenous Early Career Researchers" (ECRs) project reported that efforts of Indigenous ECRs are often undermined by examples of micro-racism. Shared personal experiences revealed racist attitudes and assumptions held by some non-Indigenous academics. This draws critical attention to the fact that while many…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

Many of today's students are experiencing higher levels of stress and anxiety in school. The need for competitive grades, the desire to be seen as perfect in a digital society, and parental pressures are only some of the reasons that students are experiencing more stress. This increased stress has lead to an overworked mind for many youth, dubbed…

Relationships support social animals' health, but maintaining relationships is challenging. When transitioning to parenthood, new parents balance pair-bond maintenance with infant care. We studied pair-bond maintenance via affiliation in 22 adult titi monkey pairs ("Plecturocebus cupreus") for 16 months centered around their first…

When it comes to creationism, it might seem as if the United States is trapped in a century-long culture-war rut. In a sense, the Scopes Trial of 1925 put science itself on trial, and it can seem as if every new dispute over teaching evolution is only a repetition of that famous trial. In truth, however, the power of creationism has ebbed…

This article uses a theory of recognition and empathy to examine how human connection online is developed in digital applied theatre practice and pedagogy. Theatre activities and university teaching were challenged during the pandemic 2020. Here, the work of Curious Monkey Theatre Company and a collaborative digital learning project for university…

Although John Scopes and his famous "Monkey Trial" strongly influenced the ongoing evolution-creationism controversy, relatively little is known about Scopes's post-trial life. Moreover, many questions about his trial remain unanswered (e.g., did he actually teach evolution in Dayton?). This paper answers these questions with new…

To explore the mathematics learning experiences of those more likely to come from non-traditional educational backgrounds, ten students studying one or two maths units in the Skills for Tertiary Education Preparatory Studies (STEPS) at CQUniversity Australia were interviewed. The aim was to investigate how these students learnt to become…

Upholding a critical, ethical, multilingual stance presents numerous challenges amidst a myriad of institutional, infrastructural, and societal pressures. Despite significant breakthroughs, such as translanguaging theories and pedagogies and the evolution of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) principles, the journey towards a more inclusive and…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

In an Introduction to Digital Practices course, university students were unable to apply their newfound software program knowledge to design intricate art projects. A digital guide called a Tool Lab was created so that students could be pre-introduced to the tools and functionality of targeted software programs. Designed with the concepts of…