Perception and Motor Control in Birds: An Ecological Approach

Being both broad - perception and motor organization - and narrow - just onegroup of animals - at the same time, this book presents a new unified framework for understanding perceptuomotor organization, stressing the importance of an ecological perspective. Section I reviews recent research on a variety of sensory and perceptual processes in birds, which all involve subtle analyses of the relationships between species' perceptual mechanisms and their ecology and behaviour. Section II describes the variousresearch approaches - behavioural, neurophysiological, anatomical and comparative - all dealing with the common problem of understanding how the activities of large numbers of muscles are coordinated to generate adaptive behaviour. Section III is concerned with a range of approaches to analyzing the links between perceptual and motor processes, through cybernetic modelling, neurophysiological analysis, and behavioural methods.

"I cannot imagine a reader who will not find something completely new: some technique of which they have not heard, some recent discovery in a field with which they are relatively unfamiliar...even though each chapter provides its own useful entre into one of a wide range of research fields, it is their bringing together that provides the real inspiration." - IBIS