Techniques
This may involve studying behavior outside, in the wild
What is a field experiment?
These birds have been used to study cognition, learning, and spatial memory.
What are mountain chickadees?
This is when females are choosy about their mates.
What is intersexual selection?
Use this technique when you have three or more groups and you would like to know if their means differ.
What is an ANOVA (analysis of variance)?
The side of the brain hypothesized to have originally been specialized for ordinary and familiar patterns.
What is the left hemisphere?
A technique traditional in much of neuroscience, this can be used to see the allocation of neuronal tissue in different parts of the brain
What is brain sectioning (and staining)?
Researchers have created small and large brained lines of these animals.
What are guppies?
This is when males fight with each other for access to mates.
What is intrasexual selection?
A statistical technique for using one continuous variable to predict a second continuous variable.
What is a linear regression?
In humans, this side of the brain seems to be better at discerning global pattern details.
What is the right hemisphere?
When you conduct an experiment, it is pretty necessary to have these for comparing your treatments to.
What are controls?
The strength of sexual selection has caused the brains of these animals to evolve in a mosaic fashion (although we cannot fully rule out concerted brain evolution either).
What are dragon lizards?
These animals might select for brains that are better at hiding or are more cautious.
What are predators?
Use this technique when you have lots of correlated variables that you want to reduce the dimensionality of.
What is Principal Components Analysis (PCA)?
In many animals, this side of the brain seems to be associated with feeding.
What is the right hemisphere?
This is when you as the researcher are the force of evolution.
What is artificial selection?
These animals have brains that have evolved in a mosaic fashion in response to changes in environment, such as light environment in the forest.
What are Heliconius butterflies?
This is selection that might come from where you live.
What is ecological or environmental selection?
These techniques allow you to control for the relatedness of different species in your study to discern if observed patterns are due to common evolutionary descent or because of independent evolution.
What are phylogenetic methods, such as a phylogenetic generalized least squares regression.
A toad might accidentally ignore a predator if it approaches from this side of the body.
What is the toad's right side (which connects to the left brain hemisphere)?
When you raise animals from different species or populations in a single controlled environment
What is a common garden experiment?
These animals have been shown to have biases in striking at prey when it first viewed from either the right or the left eye.
What are toads?
These might limit the ability of the brain to evolve.
What are constraints?
This statistical technique allows you to divide your predictors into "random" and "fixed" effects.
What is a mixed effects model?
Why is hemispherical specialization hypothesized to have evolved?
It allows faster processing of complex recognition tasks. For example, animals with lateralized brains can recognize both unique and familiar patterns simultaneously.