Professional Summary
Behavioral ecology, cognitive ecology, social behavior, social cognition, networks, modeling
Advisor: Dr. Hobson
Hobson Lab website
Education
BSc: University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada, 2014 (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Biological Anthropology)
MSc: University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON, Canada, 2018 (Biology)
Research and Practice Interests
I am broadly interested in the intersection of social behavior and cognition. For my PhD research, I am combining computational approaches and empirical work on groups of bobwhite quail housed on the UC campus to gain an understanding of what animals know about their social context and how this influences their relationships. With my planned empirical work, I aim to compare how quail form affiliative and agonistic relationships with unfamiliar individuals and whether these relationships remain stable over time, even after periods with no visual or physical contact. Additionally, I plan to test whether manipulating an individual's foraging success influences the amount of affiliative behaviors it receives from group members (i.e., do quail prefer to form relationships with those that may benefit them). On the computational side I aim to use agent-based models to understand what social patterns (dominance hierarchies or changing social associations) can arise from specific cognitive underpinnings.
Publications
Peer Reviewed Publications
Prasher, S., Thompson, M. J., Evans, J.C., El-Nachef, M., Bonier, F., and Morand-Ferron, J. (2019. ) Innovative consumers: exploring behavioural, ecological, and physiological predictors of responses to novel food.Behavioral Ecology, , 30 (5 ) ,1216-1225 More Information
Prasher, S., Evans, J.C., Thompson, M. J., and Morand-Ferron, J. (2019. ) Characterizing innovators: ecological and individual predictors of problem-solving performance.PLoS ONE, , 14 (6 ) ,e0217464 More Information
Van der Marel, A., Prasher, S., Carminito, C., O'Connell, C., Phillips, A., Kluever, B.M., and Hobson E.A. (2021. ) A framework to evaluate whether to pool or separate behaviors in a multilayer network.Current Zoology, , 67 (1 ) ,101-111 More Information
Van der Marel A, O’Connell C.L., Prasher S, Carminito C, Frances X, Hobson E.A. (2022. ) A comparison of common behavioral observation software applications and recommendations for use.Ethology, , 128 ,275 More Information