Research interests

Behaviour is a major integrating process because it mediates interactions between animals (including humans ) and their and environments. Understanding these interactions and their evolutionary causes are fundamental goals of the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour.

Our research addresses two fundamental questions:

1. How and what information is gathered from the physical and social environment?
2. How is this information used to make decisions in order to maximise survival and reproduction?

The first is the major research goal of Hempel de Ibarra, Collett and Darden whilst the second is that of Brent, Croft, Madden, Lea and Leaver.

We focus on two key areas of behaviour.

Animal cognition, learning and memory

We carry out experimental work on perception, cognition and memory in various species including pigeons, bowerbirds, squirrels, ants and bees. In the lab, the research is mainly focused on pattern recognition and visual discrimination. Unusually, we extend these studies into the field, where we explore how cognitive processes in the wild provide adaptive benefits to individuals in the forms of locating and/or caching food supplies, attracting a mate, determining optimal foraging paths, or learning optimal food choices. This work takes approaches and paradigms established in the cognitive sciences and applies them to novel, natural systems.

Social influences on Individual Behaviour

We conduct observational and experimental work on free-living and captive social animals, including guppies, pheasants, killer whales, bowerbirds, squirrels, fiddler crabs and cattle. The work focuses on how an animal’s social environment shapes an individual’s behaviour, including their sexual behaviour, mate choice, foraging choices and cooperative interactions. The group leads the field in viewing such polyadic interactions as networks within groups, and in applying this matrix based approach to analysis of such questions.

MPhil and PhD Projects