1. Feeding and Evolution

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about the evolutionary background of feeding, focusing in particular on: (i) the importance of getting feeding ‘right’ due to the dangers, particularly as an omnivorous species, that humans face from undereating or eating the wrong things; (ii) the evolutionary reasons behind our preferences for sweet, salty and fatty tastes; (iii) the evolutionary reasons behind our innate avoidance of bitter and sour tastes, linked to poisonous and spoiled foods creating these tastes; (iv) the application of these taste preferences by food manufacturers to make their products more desirable.

Course

In this course, Professor Dominic Dwyer (Cardiff University) explores neophobia and taste aversion. In the first lecture, we think about the evolutionary background of feeding, including the reasons behind our preferences and avoidances for particular tastes. In the second lecture, we think about neophobia and its evolutionary function which stops the ingestion of large quantities of potentially unsafe substances. In the third lecture, we think about the classic understanding of taste aversion as a specialised function to enable the rapid learning of taste and illness pairings. Next, we think about some modern research which proposes that rapid learning is enabled more so by the ‘fit’ of the stimulus, in factors such as the length of time the experience lasts. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about the overall evolutionary functions that each of these taste and food related adaptations provide.

Lecturer

Professor Dominic Dwyer is the chair for the BSc and MSc exam boards in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Professor Dwyer teaches introductory statistics for undergraduate years one and two. Professor Dwyer’s research is primarily focused on how animals and people learn, as well as how that learning is expressed as behaviour. Some key focus areas of this research are computational modelling, neurodegenerative disorders, and the assessment of individual differences. Some of Professor Dwyer’s recent publications include 'EXPRESS: Instrumental responses and Pavlovian stimuli as temporal referents in a peak procedure' (2022) and 'Face masks have emotion-dependent dissociable effects on accuracy and confidence in identifying facial expressions of emotion' (2022).