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Lead Supervisor
Dr Lisa Leaver , University of Exeter.
Additional Supervisors
Dr Tim Fawcett , University of Exeter.
Dr Sean Rands , University of Bristol.
Location: Streatham Campus, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon.
For eligible successful applicants, the studentships comprises:
Project Details
Investment behaviour necessarily entails planning for the future. It can take many forms across species, and requires some degree of executive control: investors need to inhibit immediate use of an asset to store it away for a future which is, inevitably, uncertain. Investment decisions provide a window into an animal’s expectations about the future and can be expected to vary with life-history parameters.
Grey squirrels are an ideal model species for studying investment because they are natural and prolific investors, storing nuts during times of plenty to provide a reliable source of food when it is scarce. Squirrels not only decide whether to cache or eat a food item, but caching itself involves a series of predation and pilferage risk trade-offs, which co-vary with food value. As such, investment decisions directly reflect future discounting and ought to be tightly linked to executive control.
This PhD project will investigate the role of future discounting and executive control in investment decisions made by wild grey squirrels, as part of a long-term field study of squirrels living on the University of Exeter campus.
There are two key aims:
1) develop reliable assays of executive control in squirrels and record their investment decisions and outcomes in terms of successful food recovery, as a real-life measure of the costs and benefits of delaying gratification.
2) generate testable predictions of caching behaviour from integrative models that consider both optimal foraging (from the behavioural ecology tradition) and the cognitive mechanisms of discounting and executive control (from experimental/cognitive psychology);
Eligibility
NERC GW4+ DTP studentships are open to UK and Irish nationals who, if successful in their applications, will receive a full studentship including payment of university tuition fees at the home fees rate.
A limited number of full studentships are also available to international students which are defined as EU (excluding Irish nationals), EEA, Swiss and all other non-UK nationals.
Studentships for international students will only cover fees at the UK home fees rate. However, university tuition fees for international students are higher than the UK home fees rate therefore the difference will need to be funded from a separate source which the student or project supervisor may have to find. Unfortunately, the NERC GW4+ DTP cannot fund this difference from out studentship funding.
The conditions for eligibility of home fees status are complex and you will need to seek advice if you have moved to or from the UK (or Republic of Ireland) within the past 3 years or have applied for settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme.
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