Welcome to the first episode of Wild Minds, our new mini-series exploring cognitive diversity and natural behaviour through conversations with leading researchers working at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and neuroscience.
In this episode, we are joined by Nacho Sanguinetti, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the Cognitive Neuroethology Lab. His research focuses on the neuroscience of play behaviour and flexible cognition, primarily in rodents studied within more naturalistic contexts.
We speak with Nacho about the innovative experimental paradigms he has helped develop to study play in rodents, how playful behaviour varies across species, and what these differences reveal about the function and evolution of play. We also discuss the remarkable biological diversity of rodents and how this diversity can be leveraged to advance our neuroscientific understanding of cognition.
Nacho is originally from Uruguay, where he first obtained a Bachelors in Biochemistry and Masters in Neuroscience from La Universidad de la República and began working on weakly electric fish. He went on to obtain a PhD in the neurobiology of spatial navigation and play in rats, in the lab of Michael Brecht Lab at Humboldt University, Berlin. Subsequently, he completed a postdoc at Harvard University with Hopi Hoekstra and Nao Uchida, where he developed tools and approaches to study comparative play and natural behavior.
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