1,721,107 research outputs found
Where is the Information in Animal Communication?
No full textCommunication is a central topic in animal behavior studies and yet the dispute over what constitutes communication is far from settled. This chapter provides an integrative framework that views communication, in its elementary form, as an interaction between two individuals (sender and receiver) involving the use of signals by the sender as well as the processing of and responses to those signals by the receiver. This framework defends the concept of information but rejects the notion that senders are generally selected to “provide” information and that information is “encoded” within a signal. The notion that animals process information creates a bridge from studies of communication to those assessing the cognitive underpinnings of communicative behavior
Animal Thinking - Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition
No full textDo animals have cognitive maps? Do they possess knowledge? Do they plan for the future? Do they understand that others have mental lives of their own? This volume provides a state-of-the-art assessment of animal cognition, with experts from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ecology, and evolutionary biology addressing these questions in an integrative fashion. It summarizes the latest research, identifies areas where consensus has been reached, and takes on current controversies. Over the last thirty years, the field has shifted from the collection of anecdotes and the pursuit of the subjective experience of animals to a rigorous, hypothesis-driven experimental approach. Taking a skeptical stance, this volume stresses the notion that in many cases relatively simple rules may account for rather complex and flexible behaviors. The book critically evaluates current concepts and puts a strong focus on the psychological mechanisms that underpin animal behavior. It offers comparative analyses that reveal common principles as well as adaptations that evolved in particular species in response to specific selective pressures. It assesses experimental approaches to the study of animal navigation, decision making, social cognition, and communication and suggests directions for future research. The book promotes a research program that seeks to understand animals’ cognitive abilities and behavioral routines as individuals and as members of social groups
Animal Thinking
No full textSince the advent of the cognitive revolution in the 1960s, animals have been viewed as goal-seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity. This paved the way for an immensely productive research program. While this field benefited from insights into the proximate causes of animal behavior, awareness grew of the importance of taking a species’ evolutionary history and ecological adaptation into account, an insight which led to a multitude of field studies with a large range of animal species. Studies in the field and lab are now performed in concert to compensate for their respective limitations. It is this combined approach which makes current cognitive behavioral studies so rich. This identifies key questions at the frontier of present research and discusses how these questions can be translated into experiments and observations
Pharmacological dissociation between the reinforcing, sensitizing, and response-releasing functions of reward in honeybee classical conditioning
No full textReserpine depletes biogenic amines from their stores in the honeybee (Apis mellifera camica) brain and leads to impaired appetitive conditioning using sucrose as a reinforcer. Compensatory injection of octopamine or dopamine directly into the brain restores these behavioral losses. Dopamine rescues the slowing-down effect on motor patterns, but not sensitization or conditioning. Octopamine leaves the motor patterns as well as sensitization unchanged but rescues conditioning. Specifically, octopamine rescues acquisition but not retrieval. Serotonin has no significant effect on sensitization but impairs conditioning. The authors conclude that octopamine is involved in selectively mediating the reinforcing but not the sensitizing or response-releasing function of the sucrose reward, whereas dopamine is selectively involved in the expression of the motor response. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved
Single neuron activity predicts behavioral performance of individual animals during memory retention
No full textAnimal Navigation
No full textNavigation appeared early in the evolution of animals and occurs in all mobile species. The vast array of navigational capabilities in various species poses a challenge to describe and understand these capabilities. This chapter proposes a unifying framework to formulate common underlying principles that operate across different taxa. This navigation toolbox contains a hierarchy of representations and processes, ranging in complexity from simple and phylogenetically old sensorimotor processes, to the formation of navigational “primitives” (e.g., orientation or landmark recognition) to complex cognitive constructs (e.g., cognitive maps), culminating in the human capacity for symbolic representation and language. Each element in the hierarchy is positioned at a given level by virtue of being constructed from elements in the lower levels and having newly synthesized spatial semantic contents in the representations that were not present in the lower levels. In studying individual species, the challenge is to determine how given elements are implemented in that species, in view of its particular behavioral and anatomical constraints. The challenge for the field as a whole is to understand the semantic structure of spatial representations in general, which ultimately entails understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms by which semantic content is synthesized from sensory inputs, stored, and used to generate behavior
Reception and learning of electric fields in bees
No full textHoneybees, like other insects, accumulate electric charge in flight, and when their body parts are moved or rubbed together. We report that bees emit constant and modulated electric fields when flying, landing, walking and during the waggle dance. The electric fields emitted by dancing bees consist of low- and high-frequency components. Both components induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees according to Coulomb's law. Bees learn both the constant and the modulated electric field components in the context of appetitive proboscis extension response conditioning. Using this paradigm, we identify mechanoreceptors in both joints of the antennae as sensors. Other mechanoreceptors on the bee body are potentially involved but are less sensitive. Using laser vibrometry, we show that the electrically charged flagellum is moved by constant and modulated electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston organ document its sensitivity to electric field stimuli. Our analyses identify electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees as stimuli for mechanoreceptors, and as biologically relevant stimuli, which may play a role in social communication.Honeybees, like other insects, accumulate electric charge in flight, and when their body parts are moved or rubbed together. We report that bees emit constant and modulated electric fields when flying, landing, walking and during the waggle dance. The electric fields emitted by dancing bees consist of low- and high-frequency components. Both components induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees according to Coulomb's law. Bees learn both the constant and the modulated electric field components in the context of appetitive proboscis extension response conditioning. Using this paradigm, we identify mechanoreceptors in both joints of the antennae as sensors. Other mechanoreceptors on the bee body are potentially involved but are less sensitive. Using laser vibrometry, we show that the electrically charged flagellum is moved by constant and modulated electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston organ document its sensitivity to electric field stimuli. Our analyses identify electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees as stimuli for mechanoreceptors, and as biologically relevant stimuli, which may play a role in social communication
Simple reactions to nearby neighbours and complex social behaviour in primates
No full textCompared to many other animal taxa, the social behavior of primates is generally regarded to be more complex in its patterns and underlying cognition. This complexity has often been overestimated, because the same patterns of social behavior are found in taxa that are supposed to be cognitively less sophisticated and recently, for these patterns, cognitively simpler explanations have been give
Social knowledge
No full textSimply put, social cognition comprises cognitive processes that are applied to social behavior. That may sound trivially obvious; however, there are some tricky waters to be navigated in this thimble-sized definition
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