MDPI World Animal Day Webinar 2026 (Session 2)

Ronin Institute, Montclair, NJ, USA;Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, Turkiye;Originally from rural Canada, Dr. Robert Bowers earned his BA in Psychology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where he also completed their new Cognitive Science MA programme. While at Boğaziçi, his interest in the work of William Timberlake led him to Indiana University for a PhD in Cognitive Science And Animal Behavior. After postdoctoral stints at Indiana University and the Universidade do Minho, he joined the faculty at Bilkent University in the departments of psychology and neuroscience. Robert approaches the behavior and cognition of living beings from both a systems and an evolutionary orientation. His research employs a range of empirical and synthetic methods across several animal species, including quail, dogs, humans, pigeons, and rats, in laboratory contexts such as conditioning paradigms, cognitive modelling, and evolutionary process simulations. Bowers’ work is rooted in cognitive psychology and driven by behavioral biology. He focuses on how cognition operates within specific motivational contexts, exploring the structure of evolutionarily significant search problems like mate choice. Additionally, he holds an interest in the history of science, focusing on the interface between biology and psychology and working to integrate these complementary fields through systems-based approaches.

School of Psychology, Sport Science and Wellbeing, University of Lincoln, UK;Dr. Kun Guo is currently a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology, Sport Science and Wellbeing at the University of Lincoln. He holds a BSc in Human Physiology from Nanjing University and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Shanghai Institute of Physiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to his current position, he was a McDonnell-Pew Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Newcastle. Guo’s research integrates behavioral, psychophysical (psychophysics, eye-tracking), neurophysiological (brain imaging, brain stimulation), and computational approaches to investigate attention, emotion, and social cognition in humans, non-human primates, and domestic dogs. His extensive publication record includes 12 reviews/book chapters and over 100 peer-reviewed research papers in academic journals.