Spatial Representation in Animals

Abstract

Abstract Our understanding of the way in which animals know how, when, and where to orient and navigate around their environment has grown considerably over the last decade. Movements may be anything from small displacements in the immediate environment to the long-distance migration of salmon or swallows. How animals find their way around is both immensely variable and controversial - what cues they use and what senses are involved, how much they remember, to what extent they rely on instinctive information or learning, how the processing and storing of spatial information occurs in the brain. Discussion of landmark use, dead reckoning, spatial memory, and map-making ranges across disciplines, with different perspectives emerging from research in behaviour, ecology, psychology, and neurophysiology. Spatial Representation in Animals brings together cross-disciplinary research on navigation in several different species, in an accessible and exciting way. Individual authors, all eminent specialists within their fields, have been asked to present reviews of the material with which they are most familiar and to speculate about future directions in the field. This will be an ideal introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of biology or psychology taking a course in animal navigation.