L9 Innate Behaviours p2 Flashcards
From "part 2" of innate behaviours pdf
When does the following place on the innate-learned continuum
Language
FAP
Reflex
Using a Ipad
Imprinting
What is equipotentiality (or stimulus-substitution)?
Is it true?
The notion that all stimuli are equally conditionable.
It is not true due to differences in physiology.
What are the 5 aberrant operant behaviours that made learning in innate or biological factors in isolation difficult?
- Autoshaping
- Superstitious Conditioning
- Adjunctive behaviours
- Instinctive Drift
- Preparedness
What is autoshaping?
Conditioning where the CR has not been reinforced by reward or punishment but is a modified instinctive response to certain stimuli.
What is superstitious conditioning?
Conditioning that occurs when the reward or punishment occurs close to an independent behaviour and is therefore accidentally reinforced.
Did the Jenkins and Ward (1968) experiment where pigeons were pecking at a light show autoshaping or superstitious behaviour according to Rachlin (1969)?
autoshaping behaviour, as pigeons have a tendency to peck at things anyway and so the behaviour was not necessarily superstition but normal behaviour.
What are adjunctive behaviours?
Unrelated behaviours which accompany another response that has been produced by a stimulus, especially when the stimulus is presented on a schedule.
What is schedule-induced polydipsia?
What is this an example of?
When animals were trained to respond for food on a particular schedule and then also provided with water, they would drink massive amounts of water (polydipsia).
This is an example of adjunctive behaviour.
What is instinctive drift?
The intrusion of naturally occurring or innate behaviours into sequences of learned behaviour.
Pigs who were operantly trained to carry loops over to cans by Breland and Breland all of a sudden started dropping the loops and start pushing them with their noses which had not been trained.
What phenomenon is this an example of?
Why did it happen?
Instinctive Drift
It was the animals natural ‘foraging’ or ‘rooting’ behaviour and it started to act instinctively
What is preparedness?
Organisms learn some associations more readily than others due to evolutionary development.
Koelling (1966) showed that rats were more readily able to associate drinking flavoured water with being sick than with getting a shock.
Rats were more readily able to associate a light with a shock than feeling sick.
What are these examples of?
What does it mean for equipotentiality?
Preparedness
Animals have a natural tendency to associate nausea with taste cues and shocks with audiovisual cues.
It casts doubt on equipotentiality.
Why did William Timberlake believe that traditional operant experiments were misleading?
Because they forced animals to respond to highly contrived, artificial situations that forced them into certain behaviour patterns.
Therefore, they do little to advance our understanding of behaviour as they;
don’t consider the biological significance of behaviours;
the context in which they were produced from;
and the form of naturally occurring stimuli and behaviours.
What was the ‘behaviour-systems’ (or etho-experimental) approach to animal behaviour suggested by William Timberlake?
Experimenters should take into account when conducting experiments;
the biological significance of behaviours;
the context in which they were produced;
and the form of naturally occurring stimuli and behaviours.
(i.e., Make their environment more natural)
Enrichment of the living conditions of captive animals is a major part of keeping animals healthy in captivity.
What are the two different types of enrichment?
Passive and Active enrichment
