Description:
Merging evolutionary ecology and cognitive science, cognitive ecology investigates how animal interactions with natural habitats shape cognitive systems, and how constraints on nervous systems limit or bias animal behavior. Research in cognitive ecology has expanded rapidly in the past decade, and this second volume builds on the foundations laid out in the first, published in 1998.
Cognitive Ecology II integrates numerous scientific disciplines to analyze the ecology and evolution of animal cognition. The contributors cover the mechanisms, ecology, and evolution of learning and memory, including detailed analyses of bee neurobiology, bird song, and spatial learning. They also explore decision making, with mechanistic analyses of reproductive behavior in voles, escape hatching by frog embryos, and predation in the auditory domain of bats and eared insects. Finally, they consider social cognition, focusing on alarm calls and the factors determining social learning strategies of corvids, fish, and mammals.
With cognitive ecology ascending to its rightful place in behavioral and evolutionary research, this volume captures the promise that has been realized in the past decade and looks forward to new research prospects.
Brief description: Reuven Dukas is associate professor of psychology, neuroscience, and behavior, and a member of the Animal Behaviour Group at McMaster University.
Review Quotes:
"A fundamental challenge in modern science is to understand the links from brains to the plastic behaviour of individuals, groups, societies and species assemblages--and to understand how these interactions are fashioned within an evolutionary and ecological context. Dukas and Ratcliffe and their impressive team of contributors accept this challenge in a fascinating and expertly edited volume that begins with the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of learning, then addresses exciting advances in avian cognition, before proceeding to decision making in mate choice and predator-prey interaction and culminating in the role of cognition in sociality. Biologists of all descriptions as well as psychologists and social scientists need to read this book."
--Stephen J. Simpson, University of Sydney