Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Behavioural Flexibility

Aug-Sept 2026

Dr Diogo F. Antunes, UNIBE

TBC

• Wolfgang Goymann, Max Planck (DE)
• Rufus Johnstone, University of Cambridge (UK)
• Barbara Taborsky, UNIBE
• Eva Fischer, University of California Davis (US)
• Ellen D. Ketterson, Indiana University (US)
• Stephan Reber, Lund University (SE)
• Severine Trannoy, University Paul Sabatier (FR)

Animals are exposed to diverse challenges in their everyday life. They need to decide when to forage, mate, care for offspring and fight, and all of these decisions can impact the individual’s fitness and are dependent on environmental stimuli and the individual’s internal state. Due to sudden changes in the available information, such behavioural decisions might need to be adjusted to the most recent environmental conditions. To build a context-dependent behavioural response, animals must integrate the relevant environmental cues with their internal state. It is during this integrative process that animals form decisions. This ability to flexibly adjust one’s behavioural response in accordance with changing environmental stimuli is of major importance for animals’ survival and fitness. The inability to flexibly adjust behavioural responses or the integration of the wrong environmental stimuli to the individual’s internal state can be maladaptive. This raises the question of how can animals form robust behavioural responses over evolutionary time, while at the same time remaining flexible at the level of the individual. The topic of behavioural flexibility is relevant to diverse biological disciplines - as it covers questions from proximate mechanisms (endocrinology, neurobiology, physiology) to ultimate consequences (evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology). In this workshop, we aim to discuss this topic with researchers from diverse fields, bringing together experts from theoretical biology, neuroethology, evolutionary biology, and behavioural ecology. This should bring novel insights into the evolution and mechanistic principles of behavioural flexibility. The workshop will be comprised of talks given by experts from different fields, topic-focused discussion groups led by the invited Professors and round tables at the end of each day. 

Alps

15