TESTING DYNAMIC RULES OF ANIMAL COGNITIVE PROCESSING WITH LONGITUDINAL DISTRIBUTION DATA

Identifying the cognitive capacity used by an animal to resolve its foraging task when facing ever-changing environmental conditions is a recent, central issue in behavioral ecology and cognitive science. Statistical confirmation of potential capacity through analysis of individual behavioral proces...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Statistica Sinica 2007-04, Vol.17 (2), p.735-748
Main Authors: Hsieh, Fushing, Horng, Shwu-Bin, Lin, Hui-Ying, Lan, Yen-Chiu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Beetles
Ecological genetics
Eggs
Evolutionary psychology
Female animals
Insect eggs
Martingales
Oviposition
Weevils
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Summary:Identifying the cognitive capacity used by an animal to resolve its foraging task when facing ever-changing environmental conditions is a recent, central issue in behavioral ecology and cognitive science. Statistical confirmation of potential capacity through analysis of individual behavioral processes becomes an important research topic. New longitudinal data arisec as a sequence of global quality distributions, representing sparsely observed environmental dynamics. Such dynamics result from an individual animal's decision-making process as it explores a patch that consists of a fixed amount of hosts. Three dynamic rules having distinct degrees of cognitive capacities are analyzed under a time-varying Markov structure. From the perspective of goodness-of-fit, two tests statistics are proposed for capturing different aspects of dynamic changes in the environmental. It is found that the test that best embraces the concept of distribution via the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve performs quite well.
ISSN:1017-0405
1996-8507