Animal Choice Behavior and the Evolution of Cognitive Architecture
- 30 August 1991
- journal article
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 253 (5023), 980-986
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1887231
Abstract
Animals process sensory information according to specific computational rules and, subsequently, form representations of their environments that form the basis for decisions and choices. The specific computational rules used by organisms will often be evolutionarily adaptive by generating higher probabilities of survival, reproduction, and resource acquisition. Experiments with enclosed colonies of bumblebees constrained to foraging on artificial flowers suggest that the bumblebee's cognitive architecture is designed to efficiently exploit floral resources from spatially structured environments given limits on memory and the neuronal processing of information. A non-linear relationship between the biomechanics of nectar extraction and rates of net energetic gain by individual bees may account for sensitivities to both the arithmetic mean and variance in reward distributions in flowers. Heuristic rules that lead to efficient resource exploitation may also lead to subjective misperception of likelihoods. Subjective probability formation may then be viewed as a problem in pattern recognition subject to specific sampling schemes and memory constraints.Keywords
This publication has 53 references indexed in Scilit:
- Energy demands of migration on red-eyed vireos, Vireo olivaceusBehavioral Ecology, 1990
- Objective Benefit Versus Subjective Perception in the Theory of Risk-Sensitive ForagingThe American Naturalist, 1987
- Methodologies for studying human knowledgeBehavioral and Brain Sciences, 1987
- The evolution of multiple memory systems.Psychological Review, 1987
- Risk-sensitive foraging by a migratory bird (Dendroica coronata)Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 1986
- The meaning of representation in animal memoryBehavioral and Brain Sciences, 1982
- Subjectively weighted utility: A descriptive extension of the expected utility modelOrganizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1978
- Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and BiasesScience, 1974
- Convexity in the Theory of Choice Under RiskThe Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1965