Exam 2 Answers Flashcards
Polistes fuscatus wasps are very good at recognizing the faces of conspecifics, while P. metricus wasps, a closely related species, are not. This is most likely primarily due to:
Differences in their social system: P. fuscatus females fight each other over the chance to become queen, so it is adaptive for them to be able to remember who they’ve encountered before.
The ability of an organism to adopt alternative phenotypes depending on environmental and/or social conditions is referred to as:
Phenotypic plasticity
Latent inhibition is a form of learning in which:
The presence of a stimulus, unassociated with another stimulus, over a long period of time, retards the ability of the animal to ever associate that initial stimulus with a new stimulus.
In the following experiment, fish were tested in a “common garden” for their ability to learn to avoid an area of their tank associated with a predator. What can we conclude from this experiment?
The difference in predator learning ability between the two populations appears to have a genetic basis.
Laboratory experiments are helpful for understanding the proximate mechanisms (‘how’) of a behavior such as learning.
True
_________________ is the basis of most training methods.
Operant conditioning
In order to understand variation in learning behavior between different species from an evolutionary perspective, we need to take into account its ecological and phylogenetic context.
True
Researchers conduct an experiment where one group of cats (Group 1) is stimulated by an audible beep and a flicker of light before they are given a food reward. A second group of cats (Group 2) is only stimulated by the beep before they are given a food reward. The researchers measured the cats’ drool and found that Group 2 drooled more than Group 1 when hearing the beep. The weaker response in Group 1 may be attributed to _____.
Overshadowing
Aversive stimulus is to inhibitory conditioning as ___________ is to___________.
appetitive stimulus; excitatory conditioning
A rat has learned to associate a blue stick with the scent of a cat, and displays a fearful response in the presence of the stick even when it doesn’t have cat odor on it. Next, the blue stick is paired with a flash of light and eventually the rat displays a fearful response to the flash of light even when the blue stick is absent. This is an example of:
Second order conditioning
Women rating men as more attractive if they’re with another woman is an example of mate choice copying.
True
The most common mode of cultural transmission is:
offspring learning from their parents
Which of the following is an example of chimpanzee cultural behavior?
- Cracking nuts with stones
- Clasping hands while grooming
- Spear-hunting bush babies
In a population of lizards, males can exist in yellow or blue color morphs. Juvenile females observe unrelated mature females mating preferentially with the blue color morph, and choose to mate with blue males once they mature. This would be an example of _____.
Oblique cultural transmission
One of the examples of seemingly non-adaptive behaviors we watched in class showed macaques doing what with stones?
Knocking them together
How do individual learning and cultural transmission differ?
Individual learning does not permit the transmission of information across generations, while cultural transmission does.
Which of the following is NOT true of mirror neurons:
They only activate when an animal is looking at itself (or its reflection).
In order for cheetah behavior to meet all criteria of teaching, scientists still need to establish that:
The cubs are learning how to hunt more quickly than they would otherwise.
