This paper aimed to explore and clarify the concept of behavioral flexibility. A selective literature review explored how the concept of behavioral flexibility has been used in ways that range from acknowledging the fact that animals' behavior is not always bounded by instinctual constraints, to describing the variation between species in their capacity for innovative foraging, a capacity that has repeatedly been linked to having a brain larger than would be predicted from body size. This wide range of usages of a single term has led to some conceptual confusion. We sought to find a more precise meaning for behavioral flexibility by representing it within a simple formal model of problem solving. The key to our model is to distinguish between an animal's state of knowledge about the world and its observable behavior, using a construct of response strength to represent that underlying knowledge. We modelled behavioral flexibility as a parameter in the function that transforms response strengths into observable response probabilities. We tested this model in simulations based on some recent experimental work on animal problem solving. Initial results showed that parametric manipulation can mimic some of the behavioral effects that have been attributed to flexibility.

中文翻译：

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行为灵活性：评论，模型和一些探索性测试。

本文旨在探讨和阐明行为灵活性的概念。选择性文献综述探讨了行为灵活性概念的使用方式，从承认动物的行为并不总是受到本能约束的事实到描述物种之间创新觅食能力之间的差异（一再被认为与大脑大于人体大小有关。单个术语的广泛使用导致了一些概念上的混乱。我们试图通过在解决问题的简单形式化模型中表示行为灵活性来找到更精确的含义。我们模型的关键是要区分动物对世界的了解状态和可观察到的行为，使用响应强度的构造表示该基础知识。我们将行为灵活性建模为函数中的一个参数，该函数将响应强度转换为可观察到的响应概率。我们基于一些最近在动物问题解决方面的实验工作，在模拟中测试了该模型。最初的结果表明，参数操作可以模拟一些归因于灵活性的行为影响。