Animal awareness: The (un)binding of multisensory cues in decision making by animals

Abstract

Each day, we perceive the world unfolding before us, and we never give a thought to having to integrate the separate sights and sounds of everyday life. They are effortlessly composed in our brain as the successive moments of our conscious lives. Cognitive neuroscientists know that the neurosensory mechanisms responsible for our seamless perceptions are astonishing (1). However, the perceptual unity of our world can “break” from neurological disorders (2) and, less dramatically, when we experience sensory illusions (3, 4). How our brain keeps the many trains of sensory information “on track and in time” in perceptual space/time is fascinating. However, humans are not the only animals on Earth that confront a myriad of sights and sounds and have to make adaptive sense of them. Ethologists and behavioral ecologists have shown that animals interacting in small groups or large societies constantly make behavioral decisions, for example, whether to court and then mate or reject, or whether to challenge and then fight or flee, decisions that are deeply consequential for an individual due to the forces of natural and sexual selection (5). Such interactions are laden with sensory cues and information from multiple modalities that the individual must translate into actions that make adaptive sense. Understanding what composes the perceptual world of animals is more challenging than self/human studies, because investigating humans is just a matter of a subject's ability to report “what happens” in plain speech, often as her/his brain is being scanned (6). The perceptual world of animals must be inferred from their reactions to experimental manipulation, which are mostly measured by their movements. Thus, the study by Narins et al. in this issue of PNAS (7) will be welcome to ethologists, comparative psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. Narins et al. designed instrumentally ingenious experiments to dissect the aggressive/territorial …