Mallpress Dave E W, Špinka Marek
Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Resources Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Czechia.
Ecol Evol. 2023 Sep 19;13(9):e10521. doi: 10.1002/ece3.10521. eCollection 2023 Sep.
The function of play has been a long-debated topic in animal behaviour. One popular class of accounts is that play offers practice for serious adult behaviour, but little has been done to model the circumstances where this could be true. In this paper, we model an individual who, over the juvenile and subadult ontogenetic periods, has a choice between three behaviours: foraging, playing and rest, where playing improves an individual's ability in some component of a serious adult behaviour. Using stochastic dynamic programming, we show that even when play is more energetically costly and an inferior form of practice than foraging itself, it still may be optimal to play under a variety of circumstances. We offer several instantiations of the play as practice concept to show the possibility of play improving a variety of different adult abilities: antipredatory, foraging and reproductive behaviour. These models show the environmental conditions where play might be expected, as well as the predicted occurrences of play throughout ontogeny. This is a first step in showing the ecological feasibility of the practice hypothesis of play and raises further questions about why playful activity is more beneficial than more deliberate directed practice.
玩耍的功能一直是动物行为学中一个长期争论的话题。一类流行的观点认为，玩耍为成年后的严肃行为提供了练习机会，但几乎没有人对这种情况可能成立的条件进行建模。在本文中，我们对一个个体进行了建模，该个体在幼年和亚成年个体发育阶段，可以在三种行为之间做出选择：觅食、玩耍和休息，其中玩耍能提高个体在某种成年严肃行为中的能力。通过随机动态规划，我们表明，即使玩耍比觅食本身消耗更多能量且是一种较差的练习形式，但在各种情况下玩耍仍可能是最优选择。我们提供了几个将玩耍视为练习的实例，以展示玩耍提高各种不同成年能力的可能性：反捕食、觅食和繁殖行为。这些模型展示了可能出现玩耍行为的环境条件，以及整个个体发育过程中玩耍行为的预测发生情况。这是证明玩耍练习假说在生态上可行性的第一步，并引发了关于为什么玩耍活动比更刻意的定向练习更有益的进一步问题。
