Tuning and Filtering in Associative Learning

The individual organisms of most animal species occupy variable environments whose detailed features cannot be fully anticipated by a genetic code. The evolutionary response to this ecological constraint has been to build into that code mechanisms for abstracting the structure of individual environments and for generating behavior based on the representations thus formed. To adequately represent an environment, an organism must encode the physical features of its world, relations among those features and events that occur in that world including its own actions and their consequences, and the temporal flow of this information in time. Memory and perception can be considered to operate in the service of the representational problem, which is an associative one in the sense that these aspects of spatiotemporal information must be extracted and encoded if an ecological niche is to be adequately described.