Life
After some years working as a prototype electronics engineer, Dickinson graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in Neuroethology, and continued his studies to obtain a pre-clinical Diploma in Neuroscience and surgery from the Royal School of Veterinary Medicine, at the University of Edinburgh.
After some time spent working as Research Associate to Dr. Alan Dixson on marmoset reproductive sex behaviour in the labs of the British Medical Research Council (1989–90) and later in the field studies of Mandrill baboons in the jungles of Gabon, West Africa (WHO attache, 1990–91), Dickinson then returned to the University of Edinburgh, where he was invited to conduct a longitudinal study concerned with the characterisation of intelligent systems (both real and artificial), involving experimental cognition work with human children, birds, monkeys, robots and human adult clinical outpatients. It was during this latter time spent in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience (1990–1999) that, under the direction of Dr. Brendan McGonigle, Dickinson prepared his PhD thesis, concurrent with his employment in the Department of Psychology as a Lecturer in Comparative Psychology and Neuroscience.
During this second period at the University of Edinburgh, Dickinson was also Master (Warden) of Salisbury Green Halls of Residence, University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Cowan House Eccentric Society, the student newspaper The Salisbury Salve, and the Salisbury Green Recital Series.
Later becoming a Chartered Psychologist (British Psychological Society), Dickinson then moved by invitation to take the position of Visiting Research Fellow to the Snyder Lab of the McDonnell Centre for Higher Brain Function at Washington University School of Medicine (WashU), in the USA (1999–2005). His principal researches there included investigations with electrophysiological correlates of hand–eye coordination behaviour in the posterior parietal cortex regions of the brain. As concurrent lecturer in Psychology and Medicine at WashU, his postgraduate and undergraduate courses included those concerned with Comparative Animal Cognition, Neuroanatomy, and the Biological Basis of Behaviour.
Before leaving the USA, Dickinson co-founded several intelligence development companies in the Far East, now wholly owned by PI Inc., and includes KBET (USA/China), Eduventure Technologies, and WPS/GCP .
Other research under Dickinson's supervision has involved the study of a wide variety of naturalistic behaviours of exotic animal species, both in captivity (largely involving the extensive collection of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland) and wild populations of various primate species in Kenya, Gabon, Bolivia and Costa Rica. Other of his supervised student projects have recruited both human and non-human primates, dolphins and other cetaceae, ungulates, birds and insects covering a broad range of comparative topics including sexual behaviour, social dynamics and organisation, feeding and communication, and developing intelligence behaviours.
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