Trimmer Peter C, Houston Alasdair I
School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
Top Cogn Sci. 2014 Apr;6(2):312-30. doi: 10.1111/tops.12085. Epub 2014 Mar 11.
Behavioral ecologists often assume that natural selection will produce organisms that make optimal decisions. In the context of information processing, this means that the behavior of animals will be consistent with models from fields such as signal detection theory and Bayesian decision theory. We discuss work that applies such models to animal behavior and use the case of Bayesian updating to make the distinction between a description of behavior at the level of optimal decisions and a mechanistic account of how decisions are made. The idea of ecological rationality is that natural selection shapes an animal's decision mechanisms to suit its environment. As a result, decision-making mechanisms may not perform well outside the context in which they evolved. Although the assumption of ecological rationality is plausible, we argue that the exact nature of the relationship between ecology and cognitive mechanism may not be obvious.
行为生态学家通常认为自然选择会产生做出最优决策的生物。在信息处理的背景下，这意味着动物的行为将与信号检测理论和贝叶斯决策理论等领域的模型相一致。我们讨论了将此类模型应用于动物行为的研究，并以贝叶斯更新为例，区分了最优决策层面的行为描述与决策形成的机制性解释。生态理性的观点是，自然选择塑造动物的决策机制以适应其环境。因此，决策机制在其进化的背景之外可能表现不佳。尽管生态理性的假设看似合理，但我们认为生态与认知机制之间关系的确切性质可能并不明显。
