Sara J. Shettleworth (born 1943) is an American-born,

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

experimental psychologist and

zoologist Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and d ...

. Her research focuses on

animal cognition Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals including insect cognition. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. It has also been strongly influen ...

. She is

professor emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

and

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overl ...

and

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes ( natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life ...

at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

. She was brought up in Maine and is a graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She started her PhD at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

and transferred to the

, where she finished her doctoral studies in comparative psychology. She has lived in Canada since 1967. Until his death in 2015, she was married to biologist Nicholas Mrosovsky. Shettleworth's research focuses on adaptive specializations of learning and the evolution of cognition. She has been a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...

and a visiting fellow at

Magdalen College Magdalen College (, ) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. It was founded in 1458 by William of Waynflete. Today, it is the fourth wealthiest college, with a financial endowment of £332.1 million as of 2019 and one of the s ...

and

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to th ...

. Her research has been supported continuously since 1974 by the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

. Shettleworth was honoured by the Comparative Cognition Society at their 2008 annual meeting for her contributions to the study of animal cognition. In 2012 the Canadian Society For Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science honoured her with the

Donald Hebb Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learn ...

award for her distinguished contributions to psychological science.

Selected bibliography

Books * Shettleworth, S. J. (2012). ''Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition (Fundamentals in Cognition).'' Oxford University Press. * Shettleworth, S. J. (2009). ''Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior (2nd ed).'' Oxford University Press. Scientific Publications * Shettleworth, S. J. (2012). Do Animals Have Insight, and What Is Insight Anyway? ''The Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66''(4), 217–226. * Shettleworth, S. J. (2010). Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology. ''Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14''(11), 477–481. * Sutton, J. E. & Shettleworth, S. J. (2008). Memory without awareness: Pigeons do not show metamemory in delayed matching-to-sample. ''Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes'', ''34''(2), 266–282. * * Cheng, K., & Shettleworth, S. J., Huttenlocher, J., & Rieser, J. (2007). Bayesian integration of spatial information. ''Psychological Bulletin'', ''133''(4), 625–637. A full list of publications can be foun
here

References

External links

Sara Shettleworth's Website at U of T
1943 births Animal cognition writers Living people Swarthmore College alumni University of Toronto alumni Canadian psychologists Canadian zoologists Women zoologists Academic staff of the University of Toronto Experimental psychologists Canadian women scientists {{zoologist-stub