How do animals gather useful information about their environment and act on it?

摘要

Animals are much more successful than current robots in their ability to gather information from the environment, detect affordances, attribute causes to affects, and sometimes generate individually novel behaviour. What kinds of mechanisms might make this possible? I will discuss different mechanisms for acquiring information in animals, and their strengths and weaknesses given different life histories and niches. I will discuss experiments which have attempted to uncover the extent of animals' abilities to use information from their environment, and the mechanisms that might be used to accomplish this. The development of these kinds of competences (in evolutionary time and over the course of an individual's lifetime) is another interesting problem. Exploration and play seem to be very important for some kinds of behaviour, particularly flexible responses to novel problems, but there is also the possibility that animals come equipped with certain kinds of 'core knowledge', which might help to direct and structure the acquisition of more complex competences.