Development of Parent-Offspring Interactions

小行星9306988 在许多鸟类和一些哺乳动物中，父母养育的后代在年龄、大小和性别上都不同。 在提供食物时，父母面临着如何在这些年轻人中分配食物的问题。 许多幼鸟必须通过乞讨行为来表示它们的饥饿。 一些非常普遍的理论预测了父母应该如何分配照顾，以及后代应该付出多大的努力来获得照顾，但是，很少有研究确切地说明父母如何区分个体年轻人以提供他们的特殊需求，以及更年轻或更小的兄弟姐妹如何成功地竞争照顾。 本研究将通过对红翅黑鸟的野外实验和观察来解决这些问题，红翅黑鸟不仅在育雏中存在年龄差异，而且在生长速度上也存在性别差异。 兄弟姐妹之间由于年龄和性别而产生的行为差异将在那些运动和视觉能力的受控测试中记录下来，这些测试将使他们能够有效地向父母乞讨。 这些测试将使克拉克博士能够确定年龄较大和年龄较小的兄弟姐妹之间竞争能力差异最大的关键时期。 我们会进行实地试验，以测试父母对不同发育阶段的子女的识别能力，以及给予适当照顾的能力。 发展测试和实验都将用于评估年幼的兄弟姐妹是否可以加速视力等某些能力的发展，这种灵活性可能有助于他们与年长的兄弟姐妹竞争。 这项研究将有助于我们从几个方面理解亲子互动。 这将是第一个调查一只无助的雏鸟与其兄弟姐妹相比的大小，年龄和性别如何影响其与父母的互动。 这将有助于为脊椎动物亲代和子代行为的理论解释提供必要的经验基础。 其次，这项研究可能会扩展我们的动物模型的家庭层面的互动，目前在人类心理学的研究热点。 这个领域的核心问题是兄弟姐妹的存在和身份如何改变家庭环境，改变父母和每个发育中的后代之间的互动。 与同年龄的早期哺乳动物不同，早期鸟类的繁殖与年龄交错的人类家庭非常相似，尽管时间尺度要短得多。 最后，视觉发育的研究利用了一种用于研究人类婴儿近视的不寻常的相机技术。 作为雀形目（栖息）鸟类视觉调节的首次研究，雏鸟乌鸫的数据将增加我们对脊椎动物（包括人类）视觉调节发育及其功能的理解。

9306988 Clark In many species of birds and some mammals, parents raise families of young that differ in age, size and sex. When providing food, parents face the problem of how to distribute it among these young. The young of many birds must signal their hunger by begging behavior. A number of very general theories predict how parents should allocate care and how much effort offspring should make to get it. However, there are few studies of exactly how parents might discriminate between individual young to provide for their particular needs and, further, how younger or smaller siblings compete successfully for care. This study will address these questions with field experiments and observations of red-winged blackbirds, a species that has not only age differences within broods but also sex differences in growth rate. The behavioral differences among siblings due to age and sex will be documented in controlled tests of those motor and visual abilities that would allow them to beg effectively from their parents. These tests will allow Dr. Clark to identify critical periods when the differences in competitive abilities between older and younger siblings are greatest. Field experiments will be used to test parents' ability to recognize and give appropriate care to young of different developmental stages. Both developmental testing and experiments will be used to assess whether or not younger siblings can accelerate the development of some abilities such as vision, a flexibility that might help them compete with their older siblings. This study will contribute to our understanding of parent-offspring interactions in several ways. It will be the first to investigate exactly how a helpless nestling bird's size, age, and sex compared to its siblings affect its interactions with its parents. It will thus help to provide a needed empirical base for theoretical explanations of parent and offspring behavior in vertebrates. Secondly, this study may extend our animal mo dels for family-level interactions, a current research focus in human psychology. The central question addressed in this area is how the presence and identity of siblings alters the family environment and changes the interactions between a parent and each developing offspring. Altricial bird broods, unlike same-age litters of altricial mammals, make excellent analogs of the age-staggered human family, albeit on a much shorter time scale. Finally, the study of visual development utilizes an unusual camera technique used for studying myopia in human infants. As a first study of visual accommodation in passerine (perching) birds, the data on nestling blackbirds will add to our understanding of the development of visual accommodation and its function in vertebrates, including humans.