Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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.
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]
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 ...
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 ...
Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention. [4] [5] Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). [5]
Proprioception is mediated by mechanically sensitive proprioceptor neurons distributed throughout an animal's body. Most vertebrates possess three basic types of proprioceptors: muscle spindles , which are embedded in skeletal muscles , Golgi tendon organs , which lie at the interface of muscles and tendons, and joint receptors, which are low ...