Chapter 4 - Section 4 Specialized Learning Abilities: Filling the Blanks in Species-Typical Behavior Patterns Flashcards
26: What are two ways in which food-aversion learning differs from typical examples of classical conditioning? How do these differences make sense in terms of the function of such learning?
1 In typical cases of classical conditioning, such as the salivary reflex studied by Pavlov, conditioning occurs only when the unconditioned stimulus follows immediately (within a few seconds) after the conditioned stimulus. Food-aversion learning fails to occur if the gap between tasting the food and the induction of illness is less than a few minutes.
2 In typical cases of classical conditioning, almost any kind of detectable stimulus can serve, but in food-aversion learning the stimulus must be a distinctive taste or smell (and taste generally works better than smell).
These distinguishing characteristics of food-aversion learning make excellent sense when considered in the light of the function that such learning serves in the natural environment. In general, poisons and spoiled foods do not make an individual ill immediately, but only after many minutes or several hours. (p. 137)
What is Seligman’s three-part classification?
Seligman (1970) proposed that all associations between events and behavior are not equally learnable. Rather, there is a continuum of preparedness, such that animals (including people) are prepared by natural selection to make some associations und unprepared, or even contraprepared, for others.
Prepared behaviors: include the association between food ingestion and nausea, as well as learned behaviors that are vital to an organism’s survival, which is most easily cquired hours after hatching.
Unprepared behaviors: those acquired through the normal processes of operant conditioning and usually take repeated trials to acquire.
Contraprepared behaviors: those that are impossible or difficult to learn despite extensive training.
Seligman’s three-part classification shows that the rules of operant conditioning are not as uniform, or general, as skinner and other behavioral theorists proposed; rather there are some biological constraints on learning, shaped over the course of evolution. (pp. 137-138)
37: How might rats learn which food contains a needed vitamin or mineral?
When first presented with food choices, a rat usually ate just one or two of the foods. Then, typically after several hours, the rat would switch to a different food or two. Such behavior - eating just one or two foods at a time - seems ideally suited for isolating articular foods that lead to an increase or a decrease in health. (p. 38)
38: How has flavor-preference learning been demonstrated in humans?
College students are presented each day with one of two differently flavored foods, which is either laced with a high-calorie substance or not so laced. (…) Apparently some delayed satisfying effect of the calories causes the students to develop a preference for the high-calorie version. (p. 138)
39: How do rats and people learn food preferences by attending to others of their kind?
Newly weaned wild rats generally limit their diets to foods that older rats in the colony regularly eat. Through this means they can avoid even tasting a food that older animals have learned is poisonous. (p.138)
40: In sum, what has natural selection imparted to young omnivores about food selection?
Two rules:
1 When possible, eat what your elders eat. Such food is probably safe, as evidenced by the fact that your elders have most likely been eating it for some time and are still alive.
2 When you eat a new food, remember its taste and smell. If the food is followed within a few hours by feelings of improved health, continue chosing foods of that taste and smell, but if you feel sick, avoid such foods. (p. 139)
41: What is some evidence that people and monkeys are biologically predisposed to learn to fear some things more easily than other things?
Through observing films, monkeys that previously feared none of the objects developed a fear of toy snakes (and real snakes) but not of flowers or toy rabbits.
Other reseach suggests that humans kearn to fear snakes and other objects that posed threats to our evolutionary ancestors - such as spiders, rats, and angry faces - more readily than we learn to fear equally dangerous objects that were not present in our early evolutionary history, such as electrical outlets, guns, and automobiles. (p. 140)
