Eleanor Caves

Biography

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and even though most of my research takes place on coral reefs, my first love is the high desert of the American Southwest. I earned my B.A. in Biology from Pomona College, CA, followed by an M.Phil in Zoology from the University of Cambridge. I then received my Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University, where I began studying the visual ecology of cleaning interactions. Before joining EEMB at UCSB, I spent one year as a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University studying perceptual processing of color in zebra finches, and then two years as a European Research Council Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in the UK, where I examined proportional processing of length-based signals in swordtail fish.

When I'm not in the lab, I am usually spending time with my son, and I try to spend as much time outdoors as I can, whether SCUBA diving, camping, or hiking with my dog Lux. I also really enjoy cooking and baking, particularly experimenting with vegetarian and vegan recipes.

Research

My research seeks to understand how animals perceive their visual world, and how that perceptual experience shapes interactions with other individuals of the same or different species. I am fascinated by the idea of the "umwelt," put forward by Jakob von Uexküll in the early 1900's to describe the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts. In particular, von Uexküll suggested that organisms can share the same environment but inhabit fundamentally different perceptual worlds as a result of differences in their sensory systems. By probing animal perceptual experiences, we can learn a lot about why animals behave the way they do in a variety of contexts. By studying a diversity of species, we will undoubtedly find that some animals have perceptual experiences that closely resemble our own while others have perceptual experiences that are quite alien.

Since von Uexküll's time, advances have been made in both sensory physiology (the physiological basis of sensory systems) and receiver psychology (the behaviors that result from sensory input). One challenge we face, however, is that sensory physiology does not directly predict an animal’s umwelt, so we are left with an incomplete understanding of how physiology influences the umwelt, the role of the umwelt in behavior, and whether constraints result in similar umwelten across species. In the Caves lab, we investigate visual perception in animals by studying links between signaling behavior and signal form, sensory physiology, perceptual processing, and behavioral outcomes across species. Our broader aim is to better our understanding of how signals and perceptual systems evolve, and in particular how and when differences in sensory capability lead to differences in perception that influence resultant behaviors. Thus, we take an interdisciplinary approach by conducting research projects that focus on different stages of sensory and perceptual processing that occur between when a sender emits a signal and when a receiver responds, including signaling behavior, signal filtering by the environment and the visual system, perceptual processing, and behavioral outcomes.