1.
Define and know examples of: insight, imprinting,
habituation, courtship
a. Insight: the ability to respond appropriately to a new
situation without previous experience
i. Innovation
ii. Octopus
1. Can figure out how to unscrew the lid of a jar
and obtain the food inside.
2. Since in nature an octopus never obtains food
exactly in this manner, researchers infer that
the octopus' behavior represents insight.
Chimp
A chimpanzee was placed in a room with
several boxes on the floor and a banana hung
high above its head.
The chimp eventually "sized up" the situation
and then stacked the boxes in order to reach
the food.
o Imprinting: a usually irreversible type of learning limited to
a specific time period in an animals life
Many behaviors have both learned and unlearned
components.
Some of the most interesting cases involve
imprinting.
Imprinting is learning that is limited to a
specific time period in an animal's life and that
is usually irreversible.
One result of imprinting is the formation of a
strong bond between two animals, often a
newborn and its parent.
In a famous study, Konrad Lorenz used the graylag
goose to study imprinting.
He divided a batch of eggs from a nest, leaving
some with the mother and putting the rest in
an incubator.
The young reared by the mother served as the
control group.
They showed normal behavior, following their
mother as goslings and eventually growing up,
mating, and interacting with other geese.
The geese from the artificially incubated eggs
formed the experimental group.
These geese spent their first two days after
hatching with Lorenz rather than with their
mother.
From then on, they followed Lorenz and
showed no recognition of their mother or other
adults of their own species.
This early imprinting lingered into adulthood.
The birds continued to prefer the company of
Lorenz and even other humans to that of their
own species.
In contrast to other kinds of learning,
imprinting takes place during a particular time
period in an animal's development called a
critical learning period.
For example, Lorenz found that the critical
period for graylag geese is the first two days
after hatching.
If geese were isolated from any moving objects
during those first two days, they failed to
imprint on anything afterward.
o Habituation: type of learning in which an animal stops
responding to a repeated stimulus little or no important
information
A change in an animal's behavior resulting from
experience is called learning.
A simple form of learning is habituation, in
which an animal learns not to respond to a
repeated stimulus that conveys little or no
important information.
Think of something you hear that carries no
meaning, like the ticking of a clock.
Eventually, you stop paying attention to it.
Once habituated to a stimulus, an animal still
senses the stimulusits sensory organs detect
itbut the animal has learned not to respond.
In other words, your ears detect the clock's
constant sounds, but after awhile your brain
does not initiate a response.
Many animals undergo habituation.
For example, a microscopic freshwater
organism, the hydra, contracts when disturbed
by a slight touch.
However, if it is disturbed repeatedly by such a
stimulus, the hydra stops responding.
Likewise, scarecrows can keep birds away from
a garden for a time.
But the birds soon become habituated to the
scarecrow and may even land on it on their
way to the garden.
How does habituation benefit an animal?
One hypothesis is that habituation allows an
animal's nervous system to focus on stimuli
that signal food, mates, or real danger, and not
waste time or energy on other, less important
stimuli.
o Courtship (ritual): elaborate behavior of individuals of the
same species before mating
In some species, animals perform elaborate
behaviors before mating, called a courtship ritual.
Courtship rituals may confirm that individuals
are of the same species but of the opposite
sex, that they are ready to mate, and perhaps
that they are not threats to each other.
Certain rituals may also be an opportunity for
an animal to advertise positive qualities to a
potential mate.
For example, an impressive fanning of tail
feathers by a peacock may indicate good
health to peahens who are choosing mates.
Dull, skimpy tail feathers could be caused by
infections or other health problems.
By choosing a healthy mate, a female is more
likely to have healthy offspring.
Note that such a behavior is not an example of
high-level thinking by the peahens.
Rather, it is an example of natural selection
refining courtship rituals that improve
reproductive success.
The following case study illustrates how biologists
used an experimental approach to investigate
courtship rituals in barn swallows.
Researchers observed that when males first
arrive at their breeding grounds each season,
they establish territories and display their long
tails.
Females choose their mates, and the pair then
raise the young together.
The researchers hypothesized that the length of a
male's tail influenced its mating successthe longer
a male's tail, the more attractive he is to females.
To test this hypothesis they used a control
group of male swallows with natural-length
tails and three experimental groups: a group
with tails cut short, a group with tails extended
by gluing on additional feathers, and a group
with cut and glued tails of natural length.
(The purpose of this last group was to test
whether the gluing process itself had any effect
on the females' choices.)
Figure 3-19 shows the results of the
experiment.
Figure 3-19
A controlled experiment demonstrated that female barn
swallows tend to prefer mates with the longest tails. One
hypothesis to explain this result is that a male must be
healthy for long tail feathers to develop. Natural selection
would favor female birds choosing these longer-tailed
males.
Why would females prefer to mate with males with
unusually long tails?
As in the peacocks, one hypothesis is that good
health is required to produce long feathers.
The researchers designed new experiments to test
this hypothesis, studying birds with naturally
varying tail lengths.
They found that long-tailed swallows and their
offspring had fewer parasites than short-tailed
swallows.
2. What is trial-and-error?
a. Insight
i. Insight may itself be based on trial-and-error
experience with related problems.
1. In this example, the chimp may have once
stood on a rock or tree stump to reach food.
2. Here, the chimp demonstrates insight by
applying a past experience to a new, slightly
different situation.
b. Operant Conditioning
i. An animal learns to associate one of its own behavior
acts with a positive or negative effect.
ii. The animal tends to repeat the response if it is
rewarded, but avoids the response if it is harmed.
1. Coyote biting a porcupine nose first learns its
lesson the hard way.