1. Introduction
- Questions about animal behaviour
- The escaping cockroach
- The courtship of the sage grouse
- Units of the nervous system
- Reflexes and more complex behaviour
- Diversity and unity in the study of behaviour
- Summary
2. The development of behaviour
- Young animals grow up
- Instinct and learning in their biological setting
- The characteristics of instinct and learning
- Genetics and behaviour
- Development and changes to the nervous system
- Hormones and early development
- Early experience and the diversity of parental behaviour
- Play
- Imprinting
- Bird song development
- Conclusions
- Summary
3. Stimuli and communication
- What stimuli are and how they act
- Diverse sensory capacities
- The problem of pattern recognition
- Sign stimuli (key features)
- โSupernormalโ stimuli
- Neuroethological basis of sign stimuli
- Other solutions for pattern recognition: generalize
- Communication
- What is communication?
- Animal signals as effective stimuli
- Honesty and deception in animal signalling
- The honeybee dance
- The calls of vervet monkeys
- Summary
4. Decision-making and motivation
- Decision-making on different time scales
- Decision-making and โmotivationโ
- Measuring motivation
- Is motivation specific or general?
- Goals as decision points
- Homeostasis and negative feedback
- Competition between motivations
- Inhibition/disinhibition
- Decision-making with incomplete information
- Conflict and โabnormalโ behaviour
- The physiology of decision-making
- Hormones and sequences of behaviour
- Conflict and physiological stress
- Decision-making, motivation and animal welfare
- Conclusions
- Summary
5. Learning and memory
- Learning as part of adaptation
- Sensitization and habituation
- Associative learning
- Specialized types of learning ability
- What do animals actually learn?
- Are there higher forms of learning in animals?
- The comparative study of learning
- Social learning and culture
- The nature of animal minds
- The nature of memory
- Summary
6. Evolution
- The adaptiveness of behaviour
- Genes and behavioural evolution
- Kin selection and inclusive fitness
- Evolutionarily stable strategies
- Sex and sexual selection
- Species isolation and species selection
- Tinbergenโs fourth question: the phylogeny of behaviour
- Summary
7. Social organization
- The individual in the crowd
- Advantages of grouping
- Diverse social groups
- Eusociality: division into castes
- Territory in the social organization of vertebrates
- Mating systems and social organization
- Dominance in social systems
- Diverse mammalian social behaviour
- Primate social organization
- Summary
References
Figure credits
Index