Being both broad - perception and motor organization - and
narrow - just onegroup of animals - at the same time, this
book presents a new unified framework for understanding
perceptuomotor organization, stressing the importance of an
ecological perspective. Section I reviews recent research on
a variety of sensory and perceptual processes in birds,
which all involve subtle analyses of the relationships
between species' perceptual mechanisms and their ecology and
behaviour. Section II describes the variousresearch
approaches - behavioural, neurophysiological, anatomical and
comparative - all dealing with the common problem of
understanding how the activities of large numbers of muscles
are coordinated to generate adaptive behaviour. Section III
is concerned with a range of approaches to analyzing the
links between perceptual and motor processes, through
cybernetic modelling, neurophysiological analysis, and
behavioural methods.