Juan Olvido, PhD has joined the EVO team to conduct his research "Seeing to signaling: ocular signaling as preverbal scaffold to linguistic communication" within the NAWA Bekker Programme.
Eyes are organs that evolved to guide animals in their environments. For animals like humans, whose survival depends on communication, there's a twist - we can learn about the intentions, mental states, and interests of others by looking at their eyes. This way, the eyes are not only organs for seeing but also for signaling. Some think that human eyes have changed
compared to those of other primates to aid in these signaling functions. This project aims to explore whether the coloration of the eye may have been one such change. To do so, we will use a combination of behavioral and physiological measurements.
Juan Olvido had a background in language studies when he became interested in the communicative functions of the human eye. His work integrates knowledge from interaction studies, comparative anatomy, psychology, and evolutionary biology. In doing so, he has recontextualized scholarly discussions about the communicative functions of the eye into broader investigations relating to photo-regulatory pigment functions in the eyeball in land vertebrates, focusing on primates. His biggest joy is to put ideas to the test, with a combination of scepticism and enthusiasm regarding his and other people's intuitions.