Chapter 51 Flashcards
behavior
acts or reactions that an organism, an individual or a system produces in response to a particular circumstance. It may be induced by stimuli or inputs from the environment whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.
releasers/sign
a stimulus that serves as the initiator of complex reflex behavior.
stimuli
A detectable change in the internal or external environment.
critical/sensitive period
a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli.
proximate
an event which is closest to, or immediately responsible for causing, some observed result
innate behavior
do not have to be learned or practiced.
cognition
The mental process of knowing, thinking, learning and judging.
causation
The act of causing or producing an effect or a result.
cost-benefit analysis
a process by which business decisions are analyzed. The benefits of a given situation or business-related action are summed, and then the costs associated with taking that action are subtracted.
ultimate
usually thought of as the “real” reason something occurred.
optimal foraging
a model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food require both energy and time.
echolocation
is the biological sonar used by several kinds of animals. Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects.
classical conditioning
onditioning in which the conditioned stimulus (as the sound of a bell) is paired with and precedes the unconditioned stimulus (as the sight of food) until the conditioned stimulus alone is sufficient to elicit the response (as salivation in a dog)
fixed action patterns
is sometimes used in ethology to denote an instinctive behavioral sequence that is relatively invariant within the species and almost inevitably runs to completion.
imprinting
rapid learning that occurs during a brief receptive period, typically soon after birth or hatching, and establishes a long-lasting behavioral response to a specific individual or object, as attachment to parent, offspring, or site
signal
any kind of coded message sent from one organism to another, or from one place in an organism to another place
orientation
the act or process of orienting or the state of being oriented. position or positioning with relation to the points of the compass or other specific directions. the adjustment or alignment of oneself or one’s ideas to surroundings or circumstances.
piloting
A mechanism of migration in which an animal moves from one familiar landmark to the next.
altruism
an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring.
taxis
a motion or orientation of a cell, organism, or part in response to an external stimulus.
compass orientation
simple and directional navigation
coefficient of relatedness
between two individuals is defined as the percentage of genes that those two individuals share by common descent.
phototaxis
the bodily movement of a motile organism in response to light, either toward the source of light ( positive phototaxis ) or away from it ( negative phototaxis ).
true navigation
navigation that is complex and directed to a point
Hamilton’s rule
kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor.
phonotaxis
The movement of an organism in relation to a sound source
circadian clock
is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours.
kin selection
a type of natural selection in which an individual attempts to ensure the survival of its own genes by protecting closely related individuals first
migration
the relatively long-distance movement of individuals, usually on a seasonal basis.
reciprocal altruism
a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism’s fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time.
