Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Perhaps as a result of the success of behavioral ecology, the mechanisms of brain and cognition have also been studied more recently from a functional and/or an evolutionary perspective, in new fields known as cognitive ecology (Healy & Braithwaite 2000; Macphail & Bolhuis 2001) and neuroecology (Bolhuis & Macphail 2001). According to the former, an animal’s ability to collect and process information should be heavily influenced by its ecology. Neuroecology refers to the study of the neural mechanisms of behavior guided by functional and evolutionary principles. How do the evolutionary pressures for complex birdsong affect the evolution of the underlying neural substrate? How does having a large home range affect one’s ability to navigate? Does having to store food place selective pressure on spatial memory and its underlying brain regions? These functional and evolutionary approaches to the study of brain and cognition have come under considerable criticism from authors who claim that they are flawed, because Tinbergen’s four whys are being confounded (Bolhuis & Macphail 2001; Macphail & Bolhuis 2001; Bolhuis & Wynne 2009; Bolhuis 2015). For example, food storing in certain species of titmice and corvids has been interpreted as a case of adaptive specialization (Healy & Braithwaite 2000; Shettleworth 2010). According to this hypothesis, food-storing birds would have evolved superior spatial memory as well as a larger hippocampus (thought to be its neural substrate) compared to their nonstoring counterparts. Both parts of this hypothesis have not been confirmed by the data (see Chapter 8 for further discussion).