Do Animals Have Agency?

Bella chats with professor Mimi Liljeholm.

Mimi is an associate professor in the department of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Learning and Decision Neuroscience Lab. Mimi and her lab study a broad range of topics, including agency, causal induction, habits, altruism, and social transmission. She is interested in studying how humans discover and represent the predictive structure of their environment, how such knowledge shapes cognition, perception, and motivated behavior, and how these processes go awry in addiction and psychopathology. In addition, Mimi adopts a multidisciplinary approach and draws a wide range of methods from psychology, neuroscience, economics, statistics, and computer science.

In this episode, we discussed Mimi's research on agency, instrumental divergence, social conformity, and how these constructs apply in our daily life. We also discussed how Mimi's current research helps us further understand artificial intelligence and what researchers can do in future studies. In the end, Mimi shared a take-home message with the audience for people interested in psychology and students who wish to pursue a career as a psychologist or neuroscientist.

You can find the paper that Mimi discussed in this episode here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.04.004.

To learn more about Mimi's research you can visit her lab at: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/LDNLab/