Perception and Motor Control in Birds

Being both broad - perception and motor organization - andnarrow - just onegroup of animals - at the same time, thisbook presents a new unified framework for understandingperceptuomotor organization, stressing the importance of anecological perspective. Section I reviews recent research ona variety of sensory and perceptual processes in birds,which all involve subtle analyses of the relationshipsbetween species' perceptual mechanisms and their ecology andbehaviour. Section II describes the variousresearchapproaches - behavioural, neurophysiological, anatomical andcomparative - all dealing with the common problem ofunderstanding how the activities of large numbers of musclesare coordinated to generate adaptive behaviour. Section IIIis concerned with a range of approaches to analyzing thelinks between perceptual and motor processes, throughcybernetic modelling, neurophysiological analysis, andbehavioural methods.