Marco Vasconcelos

Biography

 I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro. Previously, I was a FCT Investigator at the University of Minho and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford. I completed both my undergraduate degree in Psychology and my Master’s degree in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minho. Shortly after, I moved to the U.S.A. where I obtained my PhD in Psychology at Purdue University under the supervision of Professor Peter J. Urcuioli.     

Research Interest

 My main stream of research deals with decision making and rationality in non-human animals. I tackle this issue from a functional standpoint assuming that considerations of optimal design by natural selection should also be considered when analyzing decision processes. Although behavioural ecologists and psychologists emphasise different questions about behaviour, their fields are intrinsically related and data and theory from one field can often illuminate issues being studied in the other. My goal is to be able to use both mechanistic and normative models to develop a general theory of decision making applicable to a wide variety of species. My experimental work involves individual starlings in computer-controlled environments, where reward and stimulus conditions are manipulated to understand the rules animals follow as they adapt to these changes. Most of my work includes modelling, but little is purely or even predominantly theoretical. More generally, I am interested in the field of comparative cognition.