Education:
B.A., Reed College, 1960
Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1964
Postdoctoral Work:
Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 1964;
Stanford University, 1964-1966
Field: Neurobiology; neural bases of behavior; sensory and motor control of locomotion in invertebrates and vertebrates; animal movement patterns and orientation.
Research Interests:
My research and that of most of my graduate students and postdoctorals has dealt primarily with the mechanisms by which the central nervous system produces coordinated patterns of motor output to control systems of muscles used in walking and swimming and the regulation of these circuits by sensory feedback from the movements themselves. I have also been involved in short-term projects on the physiology and pharmacology of muscle, field studies on motor behavior patterns in tropical insects and orientation mechanisms in tropical fish. Most of my work has involved various species of Crustacea and, to a lesser extent, Amphibia.
Experimental approaches range from analysis of limb movements in freely-moving or partially restrained animals to intracellular analysis of synaptic interactions within the central nervous system, along with morphological observations.
An area of research related to the above involves processes of gating between central nervous patterns and mechanosensory information. This problem deals with decisions between several available sources of information and the means by which conflicting influences are controlled under a variety of environmental conditions, as when an animal steps over an obstacle or makes adjustments for differences in gravitational load between land and water. Freshwater crayfish are used for most of this work, which involves a combination of electrophysiological techniques and intracellular marking of individual nerve cells with dyes.
A more behavioral area of interest is the question of how animals choose between species-specific similar hosts for reproduction. This involves the sensory basis of orientation-chemical and other modalities. I am studying a pollinator of native fig trees. This work integrates lab and field approaches, using approaches such as movement-analysis and sensory physiology.
Recent Representative Publications:
Evoy, W. H., A. Roberts, S. R. Soffe and N. Dale. 1984. Synaptic components of the central pattern generator for swimming in an amphibian spinal cord. Neurosci. Ahs. 10: 658.
Roberts, A., N. Dale, W. H. Evoy and S. R. Soffe. 1985. Synaptic potentials in motor neurons during "swimming" in spinal Xenopus embryos. J. Neurophysiol. 54: 1-10.
Evoy, W. H. 1986. Is anything fixed in an action pattern? Behav. Brain Sci. 9: 603-604