Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 62

The examples and comparisons across various sense modalities and species we have reviewed show that perceptual worlds are shaped up to the nature of the sensory systems which in turn are adapted and adaptable to behaviorally relevant stimuli. No matter what the sensory world looks like, the orientation and communication in that world requires basic strategies of stimulus perception involving recognition and localization. The employed tactics take advantage of individual experience as well as peculiarities that emerged during evolution of the species in dependence on the ecological benefits and constraints.

Animals—including humans—tend to abstract objects in terms of configurational features. The resulting sign-stimulus elicits an assigned behavior that depends on motivation and attention. Sign-stimuli are as simple as possible and resemble the originals as closely as necessary. They facilitate both perception and communication, thereby minimizing misinterpretations between “sender” and “receiver.” Neurobiological instruments underlying stimulus perception range from specialized receptor cells in sense organs to feature-analyzing assemblies of cells and feature-detecting cells in the CNS. Certain assemblies may function in a manner of a sensorimotor-coded releasing system, that depending on motivation and attention, selects the appropriate behavior.

For most sensory modalities there are sensory brain maps containing populations of neurons selectively tuned to different stimulus features, feature combinations or configurations. Neurosensory networks may be omnipotent in that they display various degrees of plasticity involving remodeling, sensory substitution, crossmodal interaction, and learning.