Our research

Kinds of Minds creates frameworks to understand the diversity of animal minds:

• how are they different?
• why are they different?
• what can we learn from studying these differences?

We believe that the goal of understanding the human mind will be advanced by first understanding the (perhaps) simpler and certainly more comprehensible minds of animals. Exploration of animal minds will help us comprehend the complex relationships between brain structure, cognition and the mind.

Our point of difference is our fusion of expertise from neurobiology, computer science, animal behaviour and philosophy. Our approach is to model different animal brains as different computational architectures, and through experimentation explore how computational architectures of animal brains constrain the cognitive abilities of different animal minds.

Our goal is to deliver new frameworks to comprehend the dazzling diversity of natural animal minds, and inspire new approaches to AI.

Projects within this program are:

• Active AI – How do natural animal movements enhance their decision making? Can we adapt these principles to build better autonomous robots? We study how the brains of bees, flies and ants process complex visual information and how they use movement to enhance their vision and decision making.
• The Brain Atlas – An experimental lab equipped for high resolution brain imaging and quantification and neuron counting to develop a large scale comparative database of animal brain structure and anatomy. This will help us understand how brains evolve.
• The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition – How did the dazzling array of animal minds we see today evolve? This project explores the hypothesis that the evolutionary history of animal minds is best understood as a few major transitions, each of which gave rise to radical new types of animal intelligence. Learn more about the project and our partners.

Our partners are:

• Duke University
• Flinders University
• Opteran Technologies
• Princeton University
• the Australian National University
• the University of Cambridge
• the University of Sheffield
• the University of St Andrews
• the University of Sussex.

Our major funding partners are:

• the Templeton World Charity Foundation
• the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
• the Australian Research Council.

The Decision Intelligence program creates frameworks to improve decision processes in organisations. Facts and solid assumptions based on big data and advanced technologies (intelligence) already build the basis for many decision processes. However, today’s challenges in organisations across the corporate sector, governments and society lay also in interpreting data, information or knowledge and creating a consensus about implications (mindset).

We believe that different kinds of filtering of intelligence from data-to-action are vital to overcoming many of today’s decision-making challenges, such as:

• polarised opinions
• the influence of cognitive biases, from their non-existence in rational assessments to complete negligence in ideologies
• the identification of hidden dissent or false consensus among the stakeholders of the decision process.

Our point of difference is our integration of multiple perspectives based on an inter-disciplinary approach, including management science, neuroscience, law, engineering etc. The disciplines involved aim at leveraging existing (digital) solutions to develop new applied solutions when dealing with opinions, cognitive biases and consensus/dissent within or between organisations.

We aim to develop new frameworks and approaches to address the above-mentioned challenges.

Just as experience shapes animals’ minds, human intelligence is inextricably embedded in the cultures in which it develops. We think with and through the cultures we inhabit, so thoroughly that it can seem like ‘human nature’ to us. We struggle even to imagine some other peoples’ points of view, so alien can they appear, and yet we still often underestimate how much our diverse upbringings and experiences equip us with diverse cognitive, emotional and motivational equipment.

To build cooperation and true understanding, we cannot start by assuming that every mind works in the same way. The neurodiversity movement, studies of highly skilled people, and cross-cultural research all offer evidence against this assumption that we all share identical mental lives. Cultures around the world with radically different languages, skills, senses, childrearing practices and forms of thinking show us what is possible with a human nervous system.

Our brains and bodies turn experience into physiology throughout our lives, making hard-earned lessons or sought-after skills into ordinary, everyday, scarcely conscious activities, even habits. Cultures shape our minds, which in turn recreate these cultures, often in innovative ways.

Launching late 2023.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Early Career Researcher Grant funding round.

Patrick Burke
FinPrint: Identifying shark species and provenance through X-ray fluorescence and machine learning

Paul Crosby
The reel deal? An experimental analysis of AI movie synopses

Ivan Ho
Navigating transparency: How customers perceive the trade-off between explainability and predictability in AI

Evelyn Lee
Artificial intelligence framework for mental health and treatment

Cathy Macpherson
Do attentional focus and partner gaze impact interpersonal coordination?

Terry Pan
Folklore-formed culture traits and corporate misconduct

Eugene Poh
The influence of attention on learning of motor skills

Laura Ryan
Magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography (MREPT) to investigate impacts of lead toxicity on sparrow brains

Richard Savery
Investigating Interruption Dynamics and Communication Modalities in Human-AI Interaction within Music Education

Louise Tosetto
Taking a visionary approach to Plains-wanderer conservation

Roslyn Wong
The impact of culture on the continued influence of misinformation during reading

Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Early Career Researcher Grant funding round.

Paul Crosby
So long piano man? An experimental analysis of AI song reproductions

Hayley Cullen
The impact of misinformation presented during jury deliberation on juror memory and decision-making

Carmen da Silva
How will climate change impact native bee performance and decision making?

Marie-Genevieve Guiraud
Active vision in bees: object invariance

Ines Hipolito
Redefining our understanding of intelligence in the era of artificial cognition

Tim Jackson
Shared Decision Making and Social Prescribing in GP Consultations: An observational Study

Laura McLauchlan
Learning empathy and challenging racism with concepts from relational neurobiology

Laura Ryan
The effects of marine pollutants on fish cognition

Marcel Sayre
Unravelling the neural basis of path integration in bees and ants". Is there anything you need from me at this stage?

Louise Tosetto
Now we see you, now we don't: Developing habitat for the Plains-wanderer bird which improves camouflage from a visual perspective of predators