Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 28

Driving a car during rush-hour, we are exposed to a flood of information that bombards our sensory systems through various channels: visual, auditory, vibratory, somatosensory, etc. If the central nervous system (CNS) were to respond to all this information simultaneously, chaos would develop. Thus, on the one hand, the CNS must be ready to collect information from different sensory channels and to process these in parallel and concurrently; on the other hand, it must be selective: perceiving the right thing in the right place at the right time—say, a traffic sign—and responding to it appropriately, for example, by stepping on the brakes. This involves localization, identification, and decision-making. In general, all animals employ their sensory instruments for the translation of perception into action in order to select a specific goal-oriented skill.

In this chapter, we start with a survey of sensory modalities and show that sense organs and corresponding neural networks (sensory maps) provide animals with their own sensory worlds. In the light of current investigations in different animal species, including humans, we select examples showing that Niko Tinbergen’s ideas and concepts have paved the way for ethological and neuroethological studies over the last six decades. We go on to describe quantitative relationships between stimulus and behavioral response, including discussion of the concepts of sign-stimulus, innate releasing mechanism (IRM), heterogeneous summation, supernormal releaser, and the influences of attention and motivation. Our intention is to show that various classical ethological concepts can be redefined, filled with physiological content, and thus integrated into our current knowledge.

Moving from the behavioral to the neurophysiological level of analysis, we explore stimulus perception and the behavior that ensues, from which some general principles across species emerge. In the CNS, there are stimulus-response mediating pathways and neural loops that modulate, modify, or even specify that mediation. Using neuronal correlates of releasing mechanisms as well as neural network modeling, which operate as sensori-motor interfaces, we discuss sensory structures involved in feature detection including olfaction in insects, configurational visual object perception in toads and monkeys, and visual perception in primates.