Michael J. Ryan is the Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology at The University of Texas at Austin and Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama since 1982. He received his PhD in Neurobiology & Behavior from Cornell University and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley before beginning a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, where he has remained since 1984. Dr.

A decision is a deliberative process that leads to a commitment to a categorical proposition or plan of action. For example, a jury takes time to weigh evidence for alternative interpretations before settling on a verdict. In this lecture I will describe advances in our understanding of how deliberation is implemented in the brain. A common framework, termed bounded evidence accumulation or bounded drift-diffusion, accounts for the speed, accuracy and confidence of perceptual decisions, and this computational framework is supported by a common set of neural mechanisms.

Building on the foundation of the previous lecture, I will shape the window on cognition into a lens through which seemingly elusive problems may be rendered conspicuous. I will present experimental evidence that the transition from non-conscious mental processing to conscious awareness is in essence a decision. The experiment uses Libet’s mental chronometry, so it also touches on the topic of free will and responsibility.

Over the past two decades, my colleagues and I have documented many differences in the cognitive and social abilities of human children and their nearest great ape relatives. In this talk, I attempt to bring these studies together into a coherent theory of the ontogeny of uniquely human psychology. For each of eight uniquely human developmental pathways - four cognitive and four sociomoral – there are two key transitions: one at 9 months (joint intentionality) and one at 3 years (collective intentionality).