Behaviour
The ability to respond to the environment is an essential characteristic of the living world. Studies in this field examine a broad range of behaviours, such as learning, foraging, social behaviour, mate choice, animal personality and more.
The research engages too with both the proximate mechanisms – how animals sense their environment, how they arrive at decisions, what are the neurological stimuli, etc.; and the ultimate mechanisms – what is the value of a particular behaviour to survival, in what groups does this behaviour occur or in what connections is it expressed under natural conditions?
Studies in this field comprise in the main laboratory experiments, and occasionally also field observations and computerised or analytical models.
Researchers in this field: