Dear colleagues,
Biology Thursday seminar continues this week, 1st Oct, 12:15 via zoom (link at the bottom)
with Dr. Tomer J. Czaczkes (Universität Regensburg) on
“Cognition and strategic information use in ants”
This is very exciting work at the intersection of animal behaviour, comparative psychology and economics, so don’t miss it!
See you online on Thursday!
Heikki
Cognition and strategic information use in ants
https://www.animal-economics.com/tjczaczkes
Animals have a bewildering array of different information sources available to them. This includes the abiotic world around them, their own memories, and information from other animals. How do animals choose what information
to attend to, and which to ignore? Ants, for example, tend to ignore information from their sisters (pheromone trails) when they already know where to find food. But why? Is this a hard rule, or are they flexible in their choices? Unexpectedly, we found inspiration
for our answer in Behavioural Economics. Ants may be ambiguity averse, and thus may be ignoring their sisters because pheromone trails are ambiguous about food quality. Given sufficient information, ants can make nuanced information use decisions.
But how cognitively advanced are these decisions? We test whether ants can learn the relation concepts of “sameness” and “difference”, and find that they can’t. But many individuals do something perhaps more interesting:
they develop personal heuristics for solving the challenges we gave them. Likewise, although ants have hard limits to cognition – they cannot learn to avoid pheromone trails – within their limits they develop effective heuristics in order to achieve good results.
In all, we find that ants show surprising flexibility in information use, and when up against even the limits of their impressive flexibility, can develop effective heuristics to achieve good solutions.
Heikki Helanterä is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Biology Thursday seminar
Time: This is a recurring meeting Meet anytime
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Heikki Helanterä
Associate Professor (tenure track)
Ekologian ja genetiikan tutkimusyksikkö / Ecology and Genetics Research Unit
Oulun Yliopisto / University of Oulu / Finland
heikki.helantera@oulu.fi
+358-40-7507 334