Psychology Neuroscience and Behaviour 4R03 – Special Topics in Animal Behaviour

Instructor: David R. Feinberg, PhD

• email: feinberg at mcmaster dot ca
• phone: 28664
• office: PC 407
  

TA's:

• Jillian O'Connor
  • oconnojj at mcmaster dot ca
    

• Cara Tigue
  • tiguecc at mcmaster dot ca
    

Office hours: By appointment only

Location: Burke Science Building (BSB) 238

Time: Mondays, 2:30PM-5:20PM

January 4, 2008- March 29, 2008

Course description and objectives: This term’s 4th year 4R03 seminar course will focus on the adaptive design of mate preferences. In this course we will discuss how evolutionary-based hypotheses explored in non-human animal species have been used to generate hypotheses about human mate preferences, and vice versa. We will examine theoretical papers and research reports that integrate evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, psychology, and anthropology, in order to gain a broad perspective on not only why certain signals and cues to mate quality are preferred, but how preferences can be highly dynamic in response to fluctuating environments.

Registrants are expected to be familiar with the basic principals underlying sexual selection. For the first half of the course, each week we will discuss set of papers that explores a facet of mate preferences among non-humans and humans alike. During the second half of the course, students will present a grant proposal that proposes to examine a novel hypothesis about one of the topics covered in the first half of the course.

This course is designed to help develop effective, transferable techniques among many facets of scientific research such as finding and evaluating relevant literature on adaptive mate preferences, identifying gaps in our current understanding of mate preferences, developing new ways to fill these gaps, and formulating them in such a way as to share them with a group of scientific peers.