Abstract
This project investigates how the social and physical environment influences behavioural performance in a complex environment. Animals process information about several tasks simultaneously. However, limited attention abilities constrain behaviour so that only a limited amount of information can be processed at once, which can have profound fitness influences. We recently showed that fish in familiar groups are less aggressive, consume more food, and respond faster to a predator attack than unfamiliar individuals. These results suggest that familiarity increases the ability of animals to cope with divided attention, by allowing attention to be switched from aggression to other tasks. These ideas are developed further in a series of experimental studies on young brown trout and salmon. Part 1: we investigate how familiarity influences the ability to find prey and detect predators, predicting that the advantage of familiarity will increase with the complexity of the foraging task. Part 2: since aggressive individuals focus more attention towards agonistic interactions, we predict that they are less successful in finding prey and detecting predators than less aggressive individuals. Part 3: As environmental complexity stimulate neural growth in mammals, we predict that fish reared in simple habitats will show reduced brain development, lower capacity to perform complex foraging tasks, and lower fitness in the wild compared with fish reared in complex habitats.
Sweden