Animal Learning Flashcards
Broad definition of learning? Drawbacks?
Changes in behaviour following experience
Too broad, includes things such as fatigue, disease and growth
Hinde’s definition of learning?
Changes that “cannot be understood in terms of maturational growth processes in the nervous system, fatigue or sensory adaptation”
What is habituation?
When animals stop responding to repeated stimuli (similar to adaptation)
What did Kandel do?
Won a Nobel prize for his work in mantles, testing habituation - found repeated stimulation desensitises synaptic calcium channels so reduces action potentials
What is sensitisation?
Animals become highly sensitive to a repeated stimulus
Sensitisation in rats?
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
What is an engram?
Physical basis of memory based on synaptic patterning i.e. where information is encoded in the brain
What did Benzer do?
Studied memory and learning in Drosophila genetically
Dunce mutation?
Affected learning and memory in odour/shock experiment
What have we learnt from learning/memory mutants? (3)
Behaviours map to biochemistry and gene expression
Stages of memory i.e. long term, short term
Support for Aplysia studies
Example of an insect engram?
Olfactory memories stored in ‘mushroom bodies’ (mushroom shaped structures in the brain)
Example of conditioning in fish?
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
How has learning evolved?
Conveys a fitness benefit - allowing appropriate behaviour for a given environment
Example of learning driving evolution?
Colouration in Harlequin beetles, which release damaging haemolymph. Predators learn this and avoid them, driving evolution of aposematic colouring
One trial learning?
Learning after a single response - linking stimuli with responses e.g. taste with nausea
What stimuli and responses are linked? (4)
Taste and nausea
Sound and shock
Shock with taste
Sound with nausea
What defines operant conditioning?
The animal performs a certain behaviour and receives a reward, so is positively reinforced to repeat it
Social learning (operant conditioning) in blue tits?
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
Honeybee social learning?
Task: rolling a ball Absence of demonstrator - 9/10 trained bees failed Bee demonstrator - 99% success Magnet demonstrator - 78% No demonstrator - 35%
Social learning in Japanese macaques?
Washing sweet potatoes left by researchers in the sea to remove sand - this spread throughout the pop. but only in younger animals
Cultural learning? (no adaptive benefit)
Grass-in-ear behaviour from one chimp spread it through the group despite it having no function (died out in a few years)
What is insight learning?
Where animals solve problems without any prior knowledge
Insight learning in crows?
Using stones to raise water level to gain food
Using one tool (inappropriate to get food) to access another that is
‘Insight’ learning in pigeons?
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
Jays learning in nature? Problem?
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
Maladaptive learning?
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??)
