The IFREE/ESI Lecture Series Presents: Dr. David Stephens, “The Natural History of Acquisition: Evolution, foraging, impulsiveness and behavioral plasticity.”

Sept. 21st, David Stephens, Ph.D. – The Natural History of Acquisition: Evolution, foraging, impulsiveness and behavioral plasticity. Further reading for this lecture.

Abstract: The animals, including humans, descend from an ancient lineage of resource acquiring organisms: i.e. foragers.  This talk will focus on how this evolutionary history has shaped the mechanisms of decision-making.  The talk is divided into two parts.  Part 1 will consider the basic problem of exploiting patches of resources.  I will outline how this fundamental acquisition problem differs from conventional thinking about choice behavior, and I will explain how framing of patch exploitation problems suggests a new interpretation of impulsive choice behavior (i.e. temporal discounting).  According to this view, impulsive choice behavior represents an evolutionary mismatch between an ancestral patch-like environment and a contemporary environment in which subjects must make binary-mutually exclusive choices.  I will review experimental data from both humans and non-humans that supports this interpretation. Part 2 considers the evolution of behavioral plasticity.  I present a simple model of plasticity–the flag model–that relies on two variables: the reliability of experience and uncertainty about action.  I will illustrate the value of this model in three experimental systems:  signal-use in captive blue jays; the experimental evolution of learning in fruit flies; and signaler-receiver games also in captive blue jays.  I conclude by discussing evolutionary approaches to economic behavior at a more general level.

Bio: David Stephens’s research interests include animal foraging, and non-human cognition.  His current research focuses on the evolution of decision-making, learning and behavioral plasticity.  He is the author of 65 publications including the widely cited book, Foraging Theory, coauthored with John Krebs in 1986.  He was born in Salt Lake City in 1955.  He received a D.Phil. in Zoology from Oxford University in 1982.  His is a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota, and Program Director for Animal Behavior at the National Science Foundation.

For more information on the IFREE/ESI Lecture Series, please visit our website