Transcript Animal Behavior

Animal Behavior
Don’t write - just think about this…
Why do all humans smile?
 How do sea turtles find their homes?
 Why do baby birds open their mouth
wide?
 Why do dolphins play?
 Why do birds sing?
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How?
How does an animal do something?
 How do you behave?
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Why?
Why does this behavior occur?
 Why do you do that?
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Behavior
Performed in response to a stimulus
 Stimulus: any kind of signal that carries
information and can be detected
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Response: a single specific reaction
Types of stimuli
From your senses: sensory neurons
 Endocrine: response to hormones
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Behavior
Animals with little to no brain matter
have very simple responses
 Taxis: an innate behavior
 Earthworm moves from light
 In response to light, temperature,
chemicals etc…
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Innate behavior
Instinct or inborn behavior
 Appear fully functional the first time they
are performed, even though they may
have never encountered this
 Spider builds a web
 Human baby suckles
 Baby bird opens mouth wide for food
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Learned behavior
Acquired behaviors
 Can alter their behavior as a result of
experience reward or punishment
 Toad sees something move it eats it
 Eats millipede (tastes bad) & learns to
avoid it
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4 types of learned behaviors
Habituation
 Classical Conditioning
 Operant Conditioning
 Insight Learning
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Habituation
A process by which an animal decreases
or stops its response to a repetitive
stimulus
 No reward or harm
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Get used to it and then ignore it
 Birds near road
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Classical Conditioning
A mental connection between a stimulus
and some kind of reward or punishment
 A dog has experience with toys, sees a
ball, expects to play: reward
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A dog sees a newspaper will hide, thinks it
might get hit
An example of Classical Conditioning…
Ivan Pavlov
 Russian physiologist studying digestion
 Dogs salivate - innate behavior
 Pavlov rang a bell every time before he
fed his dog
 Bell ( stimulus)
 Food (reward)
 Eventually he could simply ring a bell and
the dog salivated
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Operant conditioning
Used for training animals
 Learns to behave in a certain way through
repeated practice for a reward or to
avoid punishment
 Trial and error
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An example of Operant Conditioning…
B.F. Skinner
 “Skinner box”
 Rat pressed a bar correct number of
times received a treat
 Learned that the bar= a treat
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Insight
Reasoning
 Applies something already learned to a
new situation
 Given a new math problem have to use
the methods you already learned
 Hard for most animals to do this type of
behavior
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Imprinting
Innate and learned behavior
 Serves to keep animals close to mom and
close to food & home range
 Occurs in a specific time in young animals
 Afterward irreversible
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Imprinting examples
Birds learn to follow the first large
moving object they see, but then they
must remember which object that is
 Baby mammals recognize their mother
through sight and smell
 Salmon use smell to imprint on which
stream they hatched from so they can find
it again
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