The Study of Behavior Organization, Methods, and Principles

About this book

Behaviour studies now span a variety of sub-disciplines, including behavioural ecology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and evolutionary developmental biology. While the fields' rapid growth has led to startling new insights into animal behaviour, it has brought increasingly fragmented approaches to the subject. Integrating ideas and findings from a range of disciplines, The Study of Behavior provides a common framework for understanding diverse issues in behaviour studies. The framework is derived from classical ethology, incorporating concepts and data from research in experimental psychology, neurophysiology and evolutionary biology. Hogan outlines the origin and development of major ideas and issues in the field, drawing on examples throughout to highlight connections across sub-disciplines. Demonstrating how results in one area can directly inform work in others, The Study of Behavior ultimately proposes concepts to facilitate new discussions that will open the way for improved dialogue between researchers across behaviour studies.

Contents

Preface

1. The framework
2. Structure of behavior: actions, perceptions, representations, behavior systems
3. Motivation: immediate causes of behavior
4. Motivational consequences of behavior: emotion, homeostasis, expectancies, orientation, rhythms
5. Ontogeny of structure: development of behavior systems
6. Ontogeny of structure: some principles of development
7. Causes and consequences of development: reinforcement, learning, memory
8. Phylogeny of structure: evolution of behavior
9. Phylogenetic consequences: survival value (current fitness)
10. Phylogenetic consequences: adaptations and historical origins

Afterword
References
Name index
Subject index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jerry A. Hogan is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. A researcher of animal behavior for more than fifty years, his work focuses on understanding the structure, motivation and development of behavior, with tropical fish and jungle fowl as primary models. A past president of the International Society for Comparative Psychology (2002–2006), Hogan is also a co-author of Causal Mechanisms of Behavioural Development (Cambridge, 1994) and a leading contributor to Tinbergen's Legacy: Function and Mechanism in Behavioral Biology (Cambridge, 2009).