NBIK14010U Social Behaviour and Communication

Knowledge:

By completing the course the student will have obtained detailed knowledge of behavioural and communicative processes fundamental for animal social behaviour and organisation.

Skills:

By completing the course the student can:

• explain animal social behaviour and organization in terms of function, mechanism, ontogeny and evolution;
• present in details the connecting and organizing function of signals for animal social behaviour and explain the evolutionary forces that shape signals and signaling;
• explain the relative effects of physical, biological and social environments on individual behaviour;

Competences:

By completing the course the student can:

• propose alternative hypotheses to explain a behaviour, design an appropriate experiment to test them and suggest predictions;
• measure behaviour using different methods and extensively analyse the data obtained;
• critically discuss results with respect to the hypothesis tested, place them in a broad general context, link to other behaviour issues and propose further lines of enquiry;
• explain the costs and benefits of different experimental designs, data collection and analysis methods and identify sources of error;
• present her/his work (in oral and written form) at a level approaching the scientific standard;
• extract, present and critically discuss in detail the results of a scientific article about animal behaviour;
• identify and explain strengths and weaknesses in scientific articles, suggest solutions to the weaknesses and further enquiries inspired by the strengths.