Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast

Mark earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees in psychology at Central Washington University. His undergraduate and masters research experience was supervised by Roger Fouts, and was primarily focused on how sign language trained chimpanzees use pointing when interacting with humans. He then completed his PhD at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville under the supervision of Gordon Burghardt. His dissertation research focused on the development of foraging behavior and chemoreception in neonatal garter snakes. Following this Mark completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Texas at Austin where, under the supervision of Michael Domjan, he conducted research on Pavlovian conditioning of sexual behavior in Japanese quail. He did another postdoc focusing on the role of androgens on memory and functional brain activity in humans at Oregon Health and Sciences University. Mark is currently a professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University where he teaches courses in behavioral neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and comparative psychology.

Mark is co-editor (with Karen Hollis and Mauricio Papini) of Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms (Cambridge, 2022) and Pointing: Culture, Development, and Evolution (with Kim Bard and David Leavens, Cambridge, 2026). He is co-author (with Daniel Corts and Stephen Smith) of an introductory psychology textbook published in Canada called Introduction to Psychological Science: Modeling Scientific Literacy. Mark serves on the editorial boards for Journal of Comparative Psychology and Animal Behavior and Cognition. Mark has served as president of Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience of Comparative Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. Outside of work, Mark has a wonderful family and is a gym rat who drinks too much coffee and reads a lot of fiction.

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Lynne completed a BA at Algoma University in 1995 and quickly realized that she needed more out of academia. She went back to Algoma for two more years to complete a thesis and other courses she needed to move on to graduate studies. After a lot of support and encouragement from her undergraduate mentors (including a certain podcast host), Lynne went on to complete a PhD in Jeff Galef’s social learning lab at McMaster University where she got rats drunk so that they could get other rats drunk. After a post-doctoral fellowship at McMaster and SUNY Binghamton, Lynne joined the Department of Psychology at MacEwan University in 2003. It had been her goal to have a career at a teaching-focused university like her alma mater, so the fit at MacEwan has been ideal. Lynne is known for engaging classes with lots of hands-on learning, and has earned a couple of awards for her efforts. Her annual field school in animal learning (affectionately known by students as “bear camp”) provides students with insights about training and husbandry for captive animals.

Lynne’s research and scholarly work has also focused on students and their learning. She’s a co-author of a popular textbook for learning and behaviour, and her research projects are designed to train students in research rather than to build an enviable CV. In fact, her CV resembles a patchwork quilt with topics including human mate choice, personality, dog greeting behaviour in dog parks, and authentic assessment techniques for undergraduate students. Her most recent project involved a captive bear who needed to deal with his past.

Outside of work, Lynne’s got a lot of hobbies and interests. She fosters and trains dogs for a local animal rescue, travels whenever she and her partner Paul can manage it, and is usually planning at least one trip/tattoo/music festival/home renovation at all times. When she retires she would like to become a pro wrestling manager, preferably for a heel.
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Jess received her Bachelors in Psychology with Honors in 2007 from the University of Kentucky. She subsequently earned her MS (2010) and Ph.D. (2013) in Experimental Psychology, both completed in Thomas Zentall’s laboratory at the University of Kentucky. She was a Lecturer of Psychology at the University of Florida from 2013-2017, and at Georgia Southern University from 2017-2020. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the department of psychology at Auburn University at Montgomery.
Her research is in the Cognitive-Behavioral area and centers mainly on decision-making processes and suboptimal choice behavior across species. Her work explores the various conditions under which certain choices occur as well as how aspects, such as personality traits and past reinforcement history, play a role in choice behavior. One of her favorite things about being a faculty member is having the opportunity to introduce students to research and to help them navigate their career path. In addition to mentoring undergraduate researchers in her laboratory, she teaches classes in behavior analysis, cognition, and psychological careers. In 2025, she won the Auburn University at Montgomery’s Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor Award. Jess was a program committee chair for the American Psychological Association Division 6 meeting in 2026 and is currently the President of the Comparative Cognition Society. Away from work, Jess is a mother of three who loves coffee, nature, and watching college basketball and football (War Eagle and Go Cats!).
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Wait, I think this might be the first Dave on the podcast other than, well, you know....
Dave got his B.A. in Neuroscience from Franklin & Marshall College in 2004, where he worked with rats, capuchins, and macaque monkeys. He then completed an M.A. (2006) and Ph.D. (2010) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied in Aaron Blaisdell’s Comparative Cognition Lab examining the control of behavioral variability. After receiving his Ph.D. he spent three years teaching and doing research at UCLA, working with rats, pigeons, and hermit crabs. In 2012, he received a tenure-track appointment at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA, where he is now a Professor of Psychological Science.
He teaches courses in learning, neuroscience, and research methods, and runs his department’s animal research laboratory with its invertebrate and rat vivaria. He is interested in and has published work on basic behavioral processes. He has also published work on theoretical and philosophical matters, specifically as regards Skinnerian radical behaviorism, to which he was a convert after leaving UCLA. He’d like to think he’s known around his department as a friendly killjoy.
Off-campus, he enjoys Chicago Cubs baseball, going to the movies, and homebrewing odd and time-intensive beers.
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Tanya's research is at the intersection of behavioural ecology, evolution, and animal and plant cognition. The main questions they ask revolves around why and how organisms make the decisions they do and how personality, experiences, and environment impact these decisions. This research is both multi-taxa and multi-methods, spanning empirical investigations of nest-building flexibility in zebra finches during their Undergraduate and Masters at Western University, group decision-making in zebrafish and guppies with manipulated personality compositions, and theoretical modelling of the impact of personality in fruit fly populations for their PhD at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Most recently, Tanya has had the opportunity to construct a theoretical framework of what studying plant information processing should look like as a postdoc at the University of Alberta, along with designing empirical experiments to test the framework. Tanya plans to continue this line of research in their relatively new position at CUE and is excited to see how the different branches of plant behaviour compare to what we know about animal behaviour.
We talked about a lot of stuff, we made fun of Noam a bit, ok, maybe that was just me, and we of course did a deep dive on Tanya's plant cognition work.
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