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Tinbergen's four questions, named after 20th century biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, are complementary categories of explanations for animal behaviour. These are also commonly referred to as levels of analysis . [ 1 ]
Multimodal perception is how animals form coherent, valid, and robust perception by processing sensory stimuli from various modalities. Surrounded by multiple objects and receiving multiple sensory stimulations, the brain is faced with the decision of how to categorize the stimuli resulting from different objects or events in the physical world.
Animal ability to process and respond to stimuli is correlated with brain size. Small-brain animals tend to show simple behaviors that are less dependent on learning than those of large-brained animals. Vertebrates, particularly mammals, have larger brains and complex behavior that changes with experience.
Helmholtz theorized that perceptual adaptation might result from a process he referred to as unconscious inference, where the mind unconsciously adopts certain rules in order to make sense of what is perceived of the world. An example of this phenomenon is when a ball appears to be getting smaller and smaller, the mind will then infer that the ...
Vision dominates our perception of the world around us. This is because visual spatial information is one of the most reliable sensory modalities. Visual stimuli are recorded directly onto the retina, and there are few, if any, external distortions that provide incorrect information to the brain about the true location of an object. [18]
Prior to movement, an animal's current sensory state is used to generate a motor command. To generate a motor command, first, the current sensory state is compared to the desired or target state. Then, the nervous system transforms the sensory coordinates into the motor system's coordinates, and the motor system generates the necessary commands ...
Neurophysiological studies in animals provided some insights on the neural correlates of conscious behavior. Vernon Mountcastle, in the early 1960s, set up to study this set of problems, which he termed "the Mind/Brain problem", by studying the neural basis of perception in the somatic sensory system. His labs at Johns Hopkins were among the ...
Sensory organs are organs that sense and transduce stimuli. Humans have various sensory organs (i.e. eyes, ears, skin, nose, and mouth) that correspond to a respective visual system (sense of vision), auditory system (sense of hearing), somatosensory system (sense of touch), olfactory system (sense of smell), and gustatory system (sense of taste).