Meeting Abstract
Understanding why variation in decision making exists is important for informing an overall understanding of behavioral variation. Decision making is involved in many behaviors impacting fitness – such as habitat choice, foraging, etc. Because of this, it follows that everyone should optimize decision making. However, what we observe is a great deal of variation – with animals making decisions that can negatively impact fitness all the time. So why isn’t everyone great at making the optimal decision? One thing known is decision making is costly, both in terms of neural tissue and the time/energy spent information gathering and processing. There are limitations, because all time/energy spent on decision making is not spent maximizing other aspects of fitness. In addition, not all environmental cues have equal importance, and in cases where the fitness cost of making the wrong decision is particularly high, it may be beneficial to maximize response to certain stimuli. Divergent evolutionary histories and variation in stimuli importance can lead to certain cognitive biases, which skew an animal’s assessment of environmental cues away from objective perception – meaning that decision making is not always an entirely objective process. So where is this variation coming from? Animals can vary both in general cognitive ability and bias – so what determines how this variation is generated and maintained? One thing expected to influence this is the degree of environmental variability experienced. To investigate, we compare two closely-related species that of Drosophila that differ significantly in the degree of environmental variability experienced: D. sechellia and D. simulans. Contact: mpb5@rice.edu Supported by a training fellowship from the Gulf Coast Consortia, on the IGERT: Neuroengineering from Cells to Systems, National Science Foundation (NSF) 1250104.
