Animal Decision Making

On today’s episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center.

Aimee discussed how animals perceive information and what they use it for. She discussed the connection between their environment and learning for decision-making. She also discussed the costs required for learning and factors that affect animal learning.

Aimee discussed how she set up experiments to study evolution amongst animals. She also discussed the different kinds of evolutionary experiments that can be performed. She discussed how data from the experiments are collected in the lab and mentioned tests they perform to determine whether learning has occurred.

Aimee discussed some models that researchers use during evolutionary experiments. She discussed how different gene expressions are present in animals during various tasks.

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Dunlap Cognitive Ecology Lab

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