II. Learned behaviour — Learned behaviour is acquired behaviour of animal which it attains during its life time. According to Thorpe Iearned behaviour can be defined as “That process which manifests itself by adap- tive changes in individual behaviour as a result of experience.” This behaviour is the process through which individual attains experiences and Ieave their mark which permits that individual to develop new adaptations in the light of past experiences. There is a wide variation in the ability of different animals to learnA lion cub born quite helpless is sheltered and fed by its mother until it can move about It gains agility in playing with its mates. It has constant opportunity to watch and copy its parents and other members of the group. It may bunt its first small live prey when six months old. But within two years it can hunt large animals such as deer, buffalow etc. Its behaviour, and particularly the me and art of hunting may change according to ‘Circumstances throug life. A tamed lion may not be able to hunt large animals.Classification of learned behaviour : There are various kinds Of lear ing which may be described as follows : (1) Habituation, (2) Impriniing, (3) Conditional reflex, (4) Trial and error, (5) Latent learning, . ( (6) Insight learning, — « (7) Reasoning.(1) Habituation : Habituation may be [Link] the simplest form of learning. Habituation represents the reduction of responsiveness which are of no use or harm to the life of the animal. It fs an important process for adjusting animal’s behaviour to its environment. Habituation involves not the acquisition of new responses but the loss of old ones also. In this case when an animal is repeatedly given a stimulus, its natural response' Vy n Ly Mbp, Mi gradually decreases and it may disappear entirely, This car amples — with the help of following ex A snail moving across & sheet of glass retracts into itg shell glass is tapped. After a short pause it emerges and Continues craw I, second tap also causes retraction but _ soon il emerges More wi 4 Tapping is continued for many times a it is observed tha the smal response deceases gradually and finally ceases. ailClark studied the reduction of responsiveness i.c, habituation in ‘a marine annelid living in burrow in Sca-shore) Nera), basins of water. He found that jarring the liye raction of the head and anterig bas, He got the nercis - ( ina glass tube in shallow (mechanical shock) causcs rapid ret " ments of the worm into the tube, They cmerge again within a minute a stimuli (jarring of basin) were repeated frequently. It was observed that i Ie proportion of worms response fell down and finally - vanished, 7(2) Imprinting : Form of leaning in the carly period OF life is calleg imprinting. Sometimes particular early expericnce is Tetained throughoy, “Tife. It is concemed with behaviour elicited by particular visual, auditory, olfactory or tactile stimuli. It was Lorenz who introduced this topic by experiments with geese (Fig. 16). He found that broods of geese follow the object it looks or hears just after hatching. It will do so, completely ignoring anything else. Lorenz kept the mother geese away from hatching broods of gosling (young geese) and kept himself standing there. He got broods of gosling to follow him even if it sces its mother along the way. Heinworh has also found the same result with chick..A good work on imprinting has been carried out using those birds which have precocial young.Imprinting like phenomenon is clearly involved in the social develop- ment of mammals. It is of common knowledge that the younger we adop! and rear a litter of mammals the easier is to tame them. Orphan lambs reared by humans follow them about and often show little attraction towards other shecp, though sheep's general tendency is to live in group. Imprinting may have long term consequences, Particularly upon the sexual behaviour of animals. Zoo authorities have noticed the fact that hand reared animals are oftcn useless for breeding when they mature, The breeding behaviour of mammals is very much dominated by their sonse of smell, and it is perhaps not surprising to find that their carly olfactory experiences about pheromones often affect thir choice of a matc. The development of social responscs in man also depend on carly experiences, Bowlby (1969 and 77) has developed a theory of the attachment of a! baby to its mother which draws extensively from the animal experiment, He suggested that theperiod from 18 months to 3 years was specially sensitive and that separation from or lack of an adequate mother at this time Ied to a greatly increased . tisk of psychological disturbance in adolescence and later life. (3) Conditioned reflex : Reflex action'’shown under some condition is called conditioned reflex. Ivan Pavlov (1849—1936) a Russian physiolo- gist, was really one of the founder of experimental psychology. Our under- standing of the mechanism of conditioned reflex is based on the Pavlov's classical experiment on dog, demonstrating conditioned reflex, Pavlov placed a hungry dog on a stand, restrained by a hamess ai Cvery precaution was taken to exclude disturbances. In this condition a Controlled stimuli meat powder was puffed into dog's mouth through a tube.This caused the secretion of a certain amount ot saliva. He arranged a long narrow pipe from the salivary duct through the check of the dog so that the drops of saliva could be measured. He blew meat power into the dogs mouth and recorded the amount of saliva. This process was repeated several times, Now Pavlov rang a bell every time he puffed meat powder into the dog's mouth. This process was also repeated many times. After many pairing of the sound of bell with meat powder, the dog salivate upon hearing the sound of bell alone, Eventually the amount of saliva produced to the sound of bell alone was the same as that which was given to the meat powcr. _ The dog had learnt to respond to a new stimulus which was previously neutral. Pavlov called the salivation response to the bell a conditioner reflex (CR), the bell a conditioned stimulus (CS). Prior to Icaming, the mea powder was unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and salivation unconditione reflex (UCR).Thus classical conditioning is said to be “learning that takes place when a conditional stimulus (CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimu- lus (UCS)”. Pavlov found that when CS and UCS were repeatedly paired, thc strength of the CR increased steadily, But when CS alone is repeated, the strength of CR decreases, steadily. This was called extinction by Pavlov The conditioned is formed by the association of a new stimulus with ; reward (Meat powder) and this is called ‘Positive reinforcement’. A “CR’ for withdrawal can also formed by associating the C.S. with a punishmen| or ‘negative reinforcement’. An electric shock to the foot causes a dog tc lift its paw; if a sound of bell is paired with the clectric shock, the dog soo, raises its paw to the sound of bell alonc.Conditioned reflexes have been observed in many different animals from arthropods to chimpanzees. Binds leam to avoid the black and orange caterpillars of the cinnibar moth after one or two trials which reveal their evil taste. In nature we rarely observe a conditioned reflex ina ‘pure’ form as in the laboratory. Bees do not just leam to associate a colour with the nectar reward, they also leam the position of the Broup of Mowers with respect to their hive. They Ieam even at what time of day the nectar secretion in highest.(4) Trial and error learning : Animal leams many things by tri error. Leaming begins when animal associates certain Movements with favourable or unfavourable results. Thus, experimentally, trial and error learning involves cither ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’ or both. al and Thorndike’s experiment on cat : Thorndike devised a box for investigating trial-and-error learning. A bar in the box opens the door when pressed. A fish was placed before a hunger cat, placed in the box. Cat Moves about at random and sooner or later strikes the bar. Second time catFig 18. Trial and error leaming by a cat. A fish was obisined by A. Cat is trying to open the door cat after pressing the lever. B. Cat presses the lever and door is opened. Cat is forwarding to obtain the fichfaut aot Presses the lever and opens the door quickly. Further cat associates herself Pressing the bar with the reward of food. Such leaming is also called “instrumental conditioning”, Skinner used the term operant conditioning for the same. But these are no different in principle from tial and error Icaming. : Trial and error by Maze—Trial and error learning can be studied with any animal that is capable of Ieaming by maze. Basically, a maze is a route with On¢_or more choices of tums learning toa 1_goal that is favourable orunfavourable to the animal, The simplest maze is shown in Fig. 19 called’ maze. A rat was kept in the T maze. With a T maze we expect thath chance 50% of the tums will be to the right and 50% to the left, If, aft Several trials, the rat tums to the right (where food is placed) 90% of th time and to the left (no reward) . only 10% of the time, it is casy | counclude that leaming has occurred in rat by trial error method, In thi case the animal is required to make a discrimination of right tum, Trial and error is the most appro} animals perfect the co-ordination of during sessions of play with their sibli priate category under which youn their movements by practice, ofte ng Or parents,Repetitive reinforcement even i beyond which we cannot show that eine es aan response performance on any one tial. However, the longer we tO ve ‘is ai “ Tesponse beyond this maximum (‘over taining’), ihe me reinforcing a becomes to ‘extinction’ ic. the animal will 80 on responding longer it reinforcement is removed. ° ‘ \ (5) Latent learning : According to iThorpe latent learning is “theassociation of indifferent sumuli or situations without patent reward”: By this he means that the actual process may involve associative Icarning, but there is lack of any obvious reward of drive reduction and the fact that what jg learnt may not be obvious at the time, that is, it remains ‘latent’ or hidden, The learning experience is exhibited when needed by the animal. Suppose a maze is kept opposite a rat’s home cage in such a fashion that rat can wander into it at his swect will. The rat is not hungry or thirsty, nor docs he find any food or water in the maze, but he explores through it, sniffing into corners, running down blind allcys, retracing his steps and so on. Does he learn anything about the maze as he explores? Tolman is of the opinion that learning has taken place. This learning is latent and can be utilized at the time of necd. This can be tested by giving a food reward al the other end of maze? Does he perform better than a rat put for the firs time? If so, then his previous learing was ‘latent’; in that case it was no revealed until we gave him a chance to put it to good use in finding food.~4) Insight learning: The theory of insight leaming was given by Kohler and Koffka in the year 1912. It states that the ability to solve complex problems demands something more than trial and error, condi- tioned reflex, latent Icarning etc. It required some degree of previous , leaming 16 be used in new situation in a flash, insight appears to as one of the highest form of learning. Everyone can recall occasions. wheén_she solution to a problem has ‘come ina flash’. Insight may be climax to several minutes of concentrated thinking.This ability can be recognised in apes and manas the ability to develop concepts, to act in a quite new situation quite independently. It is obviously difficult to demonstrate conclusively that these arc similar processes going on in the animal. Most workers have used the term ‘insight”; when, for instance, they observe animals solving problems very rapidly. In the year 1917 Kohler performed many experiments on apes specially on a ape named Sultan. His two experiments are very famous — (1) stick problem experiment (2) Box problem experiment, In Fig..20 an hungry” ape used three boxes one on the other to get the hanging banana without any previous experience of this kind. (7) Reasoning : The early ethologists do not separate the reasoning with that of insight learning. But modern ethologists separate it and Consider it to be highest evolved form of animal behaviour found only in apes and man.