Uncertainty has long been of interest to economists and psychologists and has more recently gained attention among ecologists. In the ecological world, animals must regularly make decisions related to finding resources and avoiding threats. Here, we describe uncertainty as a perceptual phenomenon of decision-makers, and we focus specifically on the functional ecology of such uncertainty regarding predation risk. Like all uncertainty, uncertainty about predation risk reflects informational limitations. When cues are available, they may be novel (i.e. unknown information), incomplete, unreliable, overly abundant and complex, or conflicting. We review recent studies that have used these informational limitations to induce uncertainty of predation risk. These studies have typically used either over-responses to novelty (i.e. neophobia) or memory attenuation as proxies for measuring uncertainty. Because changes in the environment, particularly unpredictable changes, drive informational limitations, we describe studies assessing unpredictable variance in spatio-temporal predation risk, intensity of predation risk, predator encounter rate, and predator diversity. We also highlight anthropogenic changes within habitats that are likely to have dramatic impacts on information availability and thus uncertainty in antipredator decisions in the modern world.

中文翻译：

---

捕食风险的不确定性：概念审查

不确定性长期以来一直受到经济学家和心理学家的关注，最近也引起了生态学家的关注。在生态世界中，动物必须定期做出与寻找资源和避免威胁相关的决策。在这里，我们将不确定性描述为决策者的一种感知现象，并且我们特别关注这种关于捕食风险的不确定性的功能生态。与所有不确定性一样，捕食风险的不确定性反映了信息的局限性。当线索可用时，它们可能是新颖的（即未知信息）、不完整、不可靠、过于丰富和复杂或相互冲突。我们回顾了最近的研究，这些研究利用这些信息限制来引发捕食风险的不确定性。这些研究通常使用对新奇事物的过度反应（即恐新症）或记忆衰减作为衡量不确定性的指标。由于环境的变化，特别是不可预测的变化，导致信息限制，我们描述了评估时空捕食风险、捕食风险强度、捕食者遭遇率和捕食者多样性的不可预测方差的研究。我们还强调栖息地内的人为变化，这些变化可能对信息可用性产生巨大影响，从而对现代世界的反捕食者决策产生不确定性。