Houston Alasdair I
School of Biological Sciences, Woodland Road, Bristol BS81UG, UK.
Behav Processes. 2009 Mar;80(3):295-305. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2008.12.007.
Functional explanations of animal behaviour are based on the idea that decisions will maximise fitness. It is not straightforward to investigate functional explanations by means of laboratory experiments. Animals are not expected to use general mathematical principles to achieve optimal behaviour. Instead, they are likely to follow rules that evolved to perform well in a particular environment that may be significantly different from the environment provided in the lab. A consequence is that there is no guarantee that an attempt to replicate an environment in the lab will result in appropriate behaviour. The exact way in which the environment is instantiated in the lab may be critical. Environments with the same formal description are not necessarily equivalent. After giving examples in which the same description is instantiated on different scales, I focus on attempts to use the marginal value theorem to predict behaviour.
对动物行为的功能解释基于这样一种观点，即决策将使适应性最大化。通过实验室实验来研究功能解释并非易事。动物不太可能运用一般的数学原理来实现最优行为。相反，它们可能遵循在特定环境中演化而来的规则，而这种特定环境可能与实验室所提供的环境有显著差异。结果是，无法保证在实验室中复制环境的尝试会导致恰当的行为。环境在实验室中的具体实例化方式可能至关重要。具有相同形式描述的环境不一定是等效的。在给出了相同描述在不同尺度上被实例化的例子之后，我将重点关注利用边际价值定理来预测行为的尝试。
