A Model of the Mechanisms Underlying Exploratory Behaviour
This research addresses the problem of explaining exploratory behavior variations in animals for biologists and behavioral scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models with specific empirical data.
The study tackled the problem of understanding exploratory behavior mechanisms by comparing killifish from lakes with and without predators, finding that killifish without predators showed steeper, earlier, higher-peaked, and less area-under-curve exploration curves, and a computer model reproduced these differences by tuning a single parameter.
A model of the mechanisms underlying exploratory behaviour, based on empirical research and refined using a computer simulation, is presented. The behaviour of killifish from two lakes, one with killifish predators and one without, was compared in the laboratory. Plotting average activity in a novel environment versus time resulted in an inverted-U-shaped curve for both groups; however, the curve for killifish from the lake without predators was (1) steeper, (2) reached a peak value earlier, (S) reached a higher peak value, and (4) subsumed less area than the curve for killifish from the lake with predators. We hypothesize that the shape of the exploration curve reflects a competition between motivational subsystems that excite and inhibit exploratory behaviour in a way that is tuned to match the affordance probabilities of the animal's environment. A computer implementation of this model produced curves which differed along the same four dimensions as differentiate the two killifish curves. All four differences were reproduced in the model by tuning a single parameter: the time-dependent component of the decay-rate of the exploration-inhibiting subsystem.