Foraging for foundations in decision neuroscience: insights from ethology

Modern decision neuroscience offers a powerful and broad account of human behaviour using computational techniques that link psychological and neuroscientific approaches to the ways that individuals can generate near-optimal choices in complex controlled environments. However, until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which the structure of experimental environments relates to natural scenarios, and the survival problems that individuals have evolved to solve. This situation not only risks leaving decision-theoretic accounts ungrounded but also makes various aspects of the solutions, such as hard-wired or Pavlovian policies, difficult to interpret in the natural world. Here, we suggest importing concepts, paradigms and approaches from the fields of ethology and behavioural ecology, which concentrate on the contextual and functional correlates of decisions made about foraging and escape and address these lacunae

A New Creative Paradigm: Chaos and Freedom

In earlier times there was only one field of scholarship and this was philosophy. Nowadays, we are often told - mainly by practitioners of the humanities - that only in recent ti me has there been a split, a schism in scholarship between natural science and the humanities. This is however a fallacy stemming from a basic misunderstanding of the essence of natural science" (Lorenz Konrad, 1993). With these world Konrad Lorenz introduces the first chapter of The Natural Science of the Human Species. An Introduction to Comparative Behavioural Research. The Russian Manuscript. A work in which the great ethologist in a scholarly mixture of scientific rigour and language accessible to the layman explains his theory of a realistic conception of nature as opposed to the idealistic formulations of classical philosophy. In particular, Lorenz puts his finger on the fundamental, epistemolog- ical problem of philosophy and modern science: the possibility of bring- ing about a new union between natural science and the humanities. This fundamental aim eschews the circumspection with which this union is treated by our contemporaries, both scientists and philosophers, who these days have to compete with an ever growing number of doc- trines, paradigms and philosophies in a situation which is increasingly fragmented and relativist. A situation which is totally different from the profound philosophical synthesis typical of the great thinkers of the past. Yet it is fundamental to consider that never before has man had such interpretati ve tools at his disposal with which to be able to outline new philosophical and scientific paradigms, tools which are reliably objec- tive. This seems to be the aspiration and preoccupation of K. Lorenz and this is the challenge which awaits us on the threshold of the second millennium