MCB 419 - Exam III study guide

Lecture 15: Circadian rhythms

1. Why do animals have biological clocks? Give examples of the adaptive benefits.
2. Be able to interpret circadian activity records (e.g. wheel running).
3. Understand the difference between entrainment and masking.
4. Understand phase response curves and their relationship to entrainment.
5. Know the name of the mammalian brain structure associated with the circadian clock (suprachiasmatic nucleus, SCN) and where it is located (hypothalamus).
6. Understand the basic functional role of clock genes and clock proteins.

Lecture 16: Active sensing

1. Understand the basic steps involved in active sensing: energy generation, transmission, propagation, target interaction, return propagation, reception.
2. Describe advantages and disadvantages of active sensing relative to passive sensing.
3. Know the active sensing modalities used by different animals (e.g. bats and dolphins: ultrasound; knifefish: electricity; flashlight fish: light, etc.).
4. Know the relative spatial extent of the transmission beam for different species: (e.g., dolphin-narrow, bat-intermediate, electric fish-broad).
5. Describe why it is useful and give an example of a) spatial control, b) temporal control and c) intensity control of probe energy in active sensing systems.

Lecture 17: Memory systems

1. Describe the need for and give examples of different time scales for memory, ranging from seconds to years.
2. Understand different long-term memory systems discussed in lecture (declarative, non-declarative, explicit, implicit, semantic, episodic, emotional, etc.)
3. Know the main areas of the mammalian brain associated with different long-term memory systems.
4. Give an example of the convergence of declarative and non-declarative memory pathways in controlling behavior.
5. Understand the three components of episodic memory (what, when, where) and how the experiments on food-caching in scrub jays tested these three components.

Lecture 18: Communication

1. Know the elements that define 'animal communication'.
2. Describe the sorts of information that is conveyed in vervet monkey calls and honeybee dance.
3. Understand the difference between 'language' and simpler forms of animal communication. Be able to give some examples that might support language capabilities in non-human animals; understand why this issue is controversial.
4. Understand and be able to give examples of issues such as signal choice, specificity, range, energetics, and privacy in communcation systems.
5. List some of the general adaptive benefits of animal communication systems.

Lecture 19: Ant pheromone trails

1. List several adaptive benefits of communication via pheromone trails in ant foraging.
2. Describe ant pheromone communication from the perspective of both the sender and the receiver.
3. Explain ant behavior at a branch point in a pheromone trail, including effects of trail geometry.
4. Understand the importance of evaporation and diffusion, and the role of pheromone persistence in the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation.
5. Give an example of the type of optimization problems that can be solved using ant-inspired search algorithms.

Lecture 20: Emotions

1. Understand the difference between first-order and second-order resources, and their relationship to 'needs' and 'emotions'.
2. Give two examples of resource sharing 'agreements' or 'commitments' between individuals.
3. Give an example of how emotional responses can regulate these agreements or commitments.
4. Understand the proposed organizational diagram illustrating a subsumption-type relationship between emotions and needs.

Lecture 21: Spatial navigation

1. Understand the adaptive benefits of spatial navigation capabilities.
2. Know the sensory mechanisms associated with beacons, landmarks, compass sense, and path integration
3. Understand the difference between procedural strategies and map-based strategies for spatial navigation
4. Be able to describe the roles of path integration, skylight compass and visual landmarks in the navigational capabilities of desert ants.
5. Understand the properties of place-cells, heading-direction cells, and view-responsive cells.