Animal Learning

Question 1

Broad definition of learning? Drawbacks?

Answer 1

Changes in behaviour following experience

Too broad, includes things such as fatigue, disease and growth

Question 2

Hinde’s definition of learning?

Answer 2

Changes that “cannot be understood in terms of maturational growth processes in the nervous system, fatigue or sensory adaptation”

Question 3

What is habituation?

Answer 3

When animals stop responding to repeated stimuli (similar to adaptation)

Question 4

What did Kandel do?

Answer 4

Won a Nobel prize for his work in mantles, testing habituation - found repeated stimulation desensitises synaptic calcium channels so reduces action potentials

Question 5

What is sensitisation?

Answer 5

Animals become highly sensitive to a repeated stimulus

Question 6

Sensitisation in rats?

Answer 6

Maternal behaviour - usually, adults avoid young. After birth, pups induce odours to sensitise the mother to them, so we see decrease in latency for maternal behaviours e.g. picking up babies, especially during lactation

Question 7

What is an engram?

Answer 7

Physical basis of memory based on synaptic patterning i.e. where information is encoded in the brain

Question 8

What did Benzer do?

Answer 8

Studied memory and learning in Drosophila genetically

Question 9

Dunce mutation?

Answer 9

Affected learning and memory in odour/shock experiment

Question 10

What have we learnt from learning/memory mutants? (3)

Answer 10

Behaviours map to biochemistry and gene expression
Stages of memory i.e. long term, short term
Support for Aplysia studies

Question 11

Example of an insect engram?

Answer 11

Olfactory memories stored in ‘mushroom bodies’ (mushroom shaped structures in the brain)

Question 12

Example of conditioning in fish?

Answer 12

Blue gourami - males defend territory aggressively. They were then conditioned to associate a female appearing with the sound of a buzzer, removing the aggressive response - adaptive as they would then be less likely to attack them

Question 13

How has learning evolved?

Answer 13

Conveys a fitness benefit - allowing appropriate behaviour for a given environment

Question 14

Example of learning driving evolution?

Answer 14

Colouration in Harlequin beetles, which release damaging haemolymph. Predators learn this and avoid them, driving evolution of aposematic colouring

Question 15

One trial learning?

Answer 15

Learning after a single response - linking stimuli with responses e.g. taste with nausea

Question 16

What stimuli and responses are linked? (4)

Answer 16

Taste and nausea
Sound and shock
Shock with taste
Sound with nausea

Question 17

What defines operant conditioning?

Answer 17

The animal performs a certain behaviour and receives a reward, so is positively reinforced to repeat it

Question 18

Social learning (operant conditioning) in blue tits?

Answer 18

Breaking through milk bottle caps from doorstep milk delivery - the behaviour gave a reward so was repeated, and other birds mimicked this to spread it through the population

Question 19

Honeybee social learning?

Answer 19

Task: rolling a ball
Absence of demonstrator - 9/10 trained bees failed
Bee demonstrator - 99% success
Magnet demonstrator - 78%
No demonstrator - 35%

Question 20

Social learning in Japanese macaques?

Answer 20

Washing sweet potatoes left by researchers in the sea to remove sand - this spread throughout the pop. but only in younger animals

Question 21

Cultural learning? (no adaptive benefit)

Answer 21

Grass-in-ear behaviour from one chimp spread it through the group despite it having no function (died out in a few years)

Question 22

What is insight learning?

Answer 22

Where animals solve problems without any prior knowledge

Question 23

Insight learning in crows?

Answer 23

Using stones to raise water level to gain food

Using one tool (inappropriate to get food) to access another that is

Question 24

‘Insight’ learning in pigeons?

Answer 24

Not shown - they can learn each step i.e. moving a box to get food, but if any section changes e.g. box colour they are thrown off, showing they are not actively problem solving

Question 25

Jays learning in nature? Problem?

Answer 25

4 species studied in their seed storing locations - nutcrackers showed especially good spatial intelligence.
However, this does not make them smarter - learning is context dependent so they did not perform any better in non-spatial tasks

Question 26

Maladaptive learning?

Answer 26

Cost of learning may be high e.g. birds eating poisonous species/the insect itself being injured
Drosophila who learnt in the lab had shorter life spans (although surely this is because we kept giving them electric shocks??)