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Cognitive And Web Phenotypes Of The Western Black Widow Spider, Clint Michael Sergi

Theses and Dissertations

Animals with brains create mental representations of their environment and their own position within it, and use these representations to make decisions. The information used to create mental representations, and how animals use representations to make decisions, are functions of an animal’s evolution and ecology. Mental representations can be as simple as remembering the direction and distance home, or as detailed as a human’s mental map of their own home. I used behavior assays designed to reveal the contents of mental representations to investigate how a web spider creates representation of its environment and objects within it, and uses these …