Merging evolutionary ecology and cognitive science, cognitive ecology investigates how animal interactions with natural habitats shape cognitive systems, and how constraints on nervous systems limit or bias animal behavior. Research in cognitive ecology has expanded rapidly in the past decade, and this second volume builds on the foundations laid out in the first, published in 1998. Cognitive Ecology II integrates numerous scientific disciplines to analyze the ecology and evolution of animal cognition. The contributors cover the mechanisms, ecology, and evolution of learning and memory, including detailed analyses of bee neurobiology, bird song, and spatial learning. They also explore decision making, with mechanistic analyses of reproductive behavior in voles, escape hatching by frog embryos, and predation in the auditory domain of bats and eared insects. Finally, they consider social cognition, focusing on alarm calls and the factors determining social learning strategies of corvids, fish, and mammals. With cognitive ecology ascending to its rightful place in behavioral and evolutionary research, this volume captures the promise that has been realized in the past decade and looks forward to new research prospects.

Cognitive Ecology lays the foundations for a field of study that integrates theory and data from evolutionary ecology and cognitive science to investigate how animal interactions with natural habitats shape cognitive systems, and how constraints imposed on nervous systems limit or bias animal behavior. Using critical literature reviews and theoretical models, the contributors provide new insights and raise novel questions about the adaptive design of specific brain capacities and about optimal behavior subject to the computational capabilities of brains.

Cognitive Ecology identifies the richness of input to our sensory evaluations, from our cultural heritage and philosophies of aesthetics to perceptual cognition and judgment. Integrating the arts, humanities, and sciences, Cognitive Ecology investigates the relationship of perception and cognition to wider issues of how science is conducted, and how the questions we ask about perception influence the answers we find. Part One discusses how issues of the human mind are inseparable from the culture from which the investigations arise, how mind and environment co-define experience and actions, and how culture otherwise influences cognitive function. Part Two outlines how philosophical themes of aesthetics have guided psychological research, and discuss the physical and aesthetic perception of music, film, and art. Part Three presents an overview of how the senses interact for sensory evaluation.

Important breakthroughs have recently been made in our understanding of the cognitive and sensory abilities of pollinators, such as how pollinators perceive, memorize, and react to floral signals and rewards; how they work flowers, move among inflorescences, and transport pollen. These new findings have obvious implications for the evolution of floral display and diversity, but most existing publications are scattered across a wide range of journals in very different research traditions. This book brings together outstanding scholars from many different fields of pollination biology, integrating the work of neuroethologists and evolutionary ecologists to present a multidisciplinary approach.

How and why do trout think? How do they decide where to eat and which food to eat? Why do they refuse to behave as predicted, stumping anglers by rejecting a larger fly for a smaller one or not responding at all to anything in an angler’s box? How do trout know to bolt to one particular covered area after being hooked or flushed? Why can trout smell better than humans but not remember as well? Citing the most recent scientific findings in a readily understandable form, Thomas C. Grubb, Jr. addresses these questions and more in The Mind of the Trout. It is the first book to bring together many varied concepts of cognitive ecology as applied to trout and their salmonid relatives: char, salmon, grayling, and whitefish.

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.

Evolutionary Behavioral Ecology presents a comprehensive treatment of theevolutionary and ecological processes shaping behavior across a wide array of organisms and a diverse set of behaviors and is suitable as a graduate-level text and as a sourcebook for professional scientists.

The first book-length exploration of behavioral mechanisms in evolutionary ecology, this ambitious volume illuminates long-standing questions about cause-and-effect relations between an animal's behavior and its environment. By focusing on biological mechanisms—the sum of an animal's cognitive, neural, developmental, and hormonal processes—leading researchers demonstrate how the integrated study of animal physiology, cognitive processes, and social interaction can yield an enriched understanding of behavior. With studies of species ranging from insects to primates, the contributors examine how various animals identify and use environmental resources and deal with ecological constraints, as well as the roles of learning, communication, and cognitive aspects of social interaction in behavioral evolution. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how the study of internal mechanistic foundations of behavior in relation to their ecological and evolutionary contexts and outcomes provides valuable insight into such behaviors as predation, mating, and dispersal. Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology shows how a mechanistic approach unites various levels of biological organization to provide a broader understanding of the biological bases of behavioral evolution.

How do animals perceive the world, learn, remember, search for food or mates, communicate, and find their way around? Do any nonhuman animals count, imitate one another, use a language, or have a culture? What are the uses of cognition in nature and how might it have evolved? What is the current status of Darwin's claim that other species share the same "mental powers" as humans, but to different degrees? In this completely revised second edition of Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior, Sara Shettleworth addresses these questions, among others, by integrating findings from psychology, behavioral ecology, and ethology in a unique and wide-ranging synthesis of theory and research on animal cognition, in the broadest sense--from species-specific adaptations of vision in fish and associative learning in rats to discussions of theory of mind in chimpanzees, dogs, and ravens. She reviews the latest research on topics such as episodic memory, metacognition, and cooperation and other-regarding behavior in animals, as well as recent theories about what makes human cognition unique. In every part of this new edition, Shettleworth incorporates findings and theoretical approaches that have emerged since the first edition was published in 1998. The chapters are now organized into three sections: Fundamental Mechanisms (perception, learning, categorization, memory), Physical Cognition (space, time, number, physical causation), and Social Cognition (social knowledge, social learning, communication). Shettleworth has also added new chapters on evolution and the brain and on numerical cognition, and a new chapter on physical causation that integrates theories of instrumental behavior with discussions of foraging, planning, and tool using.