John McNamara's
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My
main research interests lie in behavioural and evolutionary biology. In
studying animal behaviour my objective has been to provide theoretical
explanations of known phenomena and to motivate and steer the direction of new
experiments. My work develops
approaches, methods and modelling tools for the functional analysis of
behaviour. These attempt to give a careful
underpinning of the theoretical foundations of the field. In particular, I have
developed a general framework that exposes the logic of how individual actions
contribute to lifetime reproductive success, and provides a common currency for
actions. This framework also
provides a natural way of building more realistic models of behaviour, allowing
behaviour to depend on state and time. A consistent theme is that a holistic
approach is both necessary to rigorously expose the logic and is essential to get realistic
predictions; it is necessary to consider sequences of actions rather than
individual actions in isolation, to derive game payoffs from other parts of the
system rather than take them as externally defined, to consider how the
existence of individual differences alters strategy sets and hence predictions,
and so on.
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John
McNamara |
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