Behaviour that can be termed musicking or dancing appears in diverse human societies on a regular basis across time and regions – so regularly that it is sometimes called a human "universal". In this seminar, we will discuss theories of the evolutionary origin of music and dance and look into empirical studies designed to test these theories.
At the end of this seminar, students will
- have acquired knowledge about common theories of the evolutionary origin of music and dance
- be introduced to two central concepts of empirical sciences: the hypothetico-deductive approach and null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST)
- be introduced to basic statistical methods of NHST (e. g., t-test, linear regression)
- and therefore will be able to deal with more technical aspects of empirical-quantitative papers
- Lehrkraft: Luca Matsukawa