Mediate Relationship With Environment

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Mediate Relationship With Environment
SOLVE PROBLEMS
OBSERVED BEHAVIOR
NEURAL/ ENDOCRINE MECHANISMS

• Find Food
• Avoid Predators
• Shelter
• Mate
• Parental Care

DEVELOPMENT
GENETIC MAKEUP
If solve problems, survive and reproduce.
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RESOURCE
TROPHIC
- materials and energy
INFORMATIONAL
- all environmental factors that have
negligible direct effects on the energy and
materials budgets of living systems or their
subsystems, BUT are capable of modifying the
internal states of organisms-- act as stimuli.
Know How Instrumental information
Know When and Where Orientational information
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Walnut trees, planted for shade in Davis,
CA, provide food for crows that roost in the
area. Crows crack the walnuts by dropping them
from heights of 5-10 m or more onto side- walks,
roads, other hard surfaces. Occasionally, crows
observed dropping walnuts on road in front of
approaching cars, as if .
How test hypothesis that crows using cars as
tools?
If , then birds more likely to drop nuts onto
roads when cars coming than when road empty.
If standing in road with uncracked nut as car is
approaching, crow should.. . SEE HANDOUTS
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Cognitive Ethology Crows Cracking Walnuts
0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0
Crows feeding on walnuts record what birds did
when cars approaching and when road was
empty. Conclusion? Epistemological Cycle?
Probability leave nut in road
YES
NO
See Handouts
Vehicle Approaching?
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Cognitive Ethology Crows Cracking Walnuts
In other respects, birds behavior with walnuts
was quite sophisticated Investigators
dropped nuts from different heights and
found difference between Black and
English Walnuts and difference in
relation to substrate. Does crows behavior
reflect these facts?
10 5 0
Mean height of drop (m)
Walnut Type Black English
Substrate Pavement
Soil
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Cognitive Ethology Crows Cracking Walnuts
Take Home Messages

• Translate hypothesis about essentially
  unobservable internal process (information
  processing) into hypotheses about observable
  behavior in a way that permits different possible
  explanations to be distinguished.
• Anthropomorphism and kinds of hypotheses people
  are willing to entertain about processes
  underlying behavior.

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Cognitive Ethology Crows Cracking Walnuts
Take Home Messages

• Free-living crows observed doing something
  suggestive of interesting kinds of information
  processing and decision making.
• Behavior examined with more controlled
  observations and experiments.
• These efforts revealed how closely the crows
  behavior matched the environmental requirements.
• Numerous processes of perception, learning, and
  decision making underlie the crows nutcracking.
  Each of these could be analyzed further. For
  example

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Cognitive Ethology Crows Cracking Walnuts
Take Home Messages

• How do crows judge the height from which to drop
  nuts?
• Must crows learn to adjust their behavior to the
  kind of nut, the kind of substrate, and the
  number of nearby crows?
• Several other species break
• hard-shelled prey by dropping
• them. What kind of environ-
• mental conditions or evolutionary
• history favors this behavior?

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Cognitive Ethology

• Cognition mechanisms by which animals acquire,
  process, store, and act on information from the
  environment.
• Mechanisms include perception, learning, memory,
  and decision making.
• Behavior results from the ability to process and
  store information about the world.
• Study of cognition consists of analyzing how
  animals acquire, process, and use information
  from the environment.

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Cognitive Ethology
ENVIRONMENT
COGNITIVE MECHANISMS (e.g., perception,
motivation, memory)
GENES
BEHAVIOR
Consider animals that ignore food when
deprived or behave in a friendly manner toward
predators
IMMEDIATE OUTCOME
FITNESS
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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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NEURAL MECHANISMSAn Animals Umwelt
Jakob von Uexkull 'A Stroll through the Worlds
of Animals and Men A Picture Book of Invisible
Worlds (1934). In his 'stroll', von Uexkull
walks us through 'a flower-strewn meadow, humming
with insects, fluttering with butterflies' and
invites the reader to 'first blow, in fancy, a
soap bubble around each creature to represent its
own world, filled with the perceptions which it
alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one
of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is
transformed. Many of its colorful features
disappear, others no longer belong together but
appear in new relationships. A new world comes
into being. Through the bubble we see the world
of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of
the field mouse the world as it appears to the
animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This
we may call the phenomenal world or the
self-world of the animal' (von Uexkill 1957, 5).
GENES
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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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DEVELOPMENT OF BEHAVIOR Imprinting

Instantaneous, irreversible process Implicated
in acquisition of various Behaviors
Song Learning
Parent Recognition
Species Recognition
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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE IRM?Prey-catching Behavior
of a Toad

Behavioral Studies Identify effective stimuli
through use of models
Model A Model B Model C
Increasing length edge Increase vertical
edge Increasing along both edges
Ewert. 1987. Neuroethology of Releasing
Mechanisms Prey-catching in Toads" Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 10 372-374, 1987
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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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Spatial Orientation Types of orientation and
reaction mechanisms

• Orthokinesis Linear velocity influenced by
  stimulus
• Klinokinesis Rate of turning
• affected by stimulus

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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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Biological Time KeepingModel of Pacemaker System

• Two major elements important for biological
  timekeeping
• Endogenous self-sustaining pacemaker
• System for entrainment to environmental
  Zeitgebers

Entrainment Pathway Clock
Output Pathway
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Cognitive Ethology

• Perception and Attention
• Recognition Learning
• Discrimination and Classification
• Memory
• Getting Around
• Timing and Counting
• Learning from Others

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Mediate Relationship With Environment
SOLVE PROBLEMS
OBSERVED BEHAVIOR
NEURAL/ ENDOCRINE MECHANISMS

• Find Food
• Avoid Predators
• Shelter
• Mate
• Parental Care

DEVELOPMENT
GENETIC MAKEUP
If solve problems, survive and reproduce.