Coping with divided attention

Project members: Jörgen Johnsson, Sian Griffiths, Svante Winberg and Bart Adriaenssens
 

This project investigates how the social and physical environment influences the ability to learn critical behavioural tasks in a complex environment. Animals process information about several tasks simultaneously. However, limited attention abilities constrain behaviour so that only a limited amount of information can be processed at once, which can have profound fitness influences. We recently showed that fish in familiar groups are less aggressive, consume more food, and respond faster to a predator attack than unfamiliar individuals. These results suggest that familiarity increases the ability of animals to cope with divided attention, by allowing attention to be switched from aggression to other tasks. These ideas are developed further in a series of experimental studies on young brown trout and salmon.