Learned Behaviour

Question 1

What is habituation?

Answer 1

• animals learn to ignore certain stimuli because repeated exposure to the stimulus results in neither reward or punishment
• it avoids wasting energy in making escape responses to non-harmful stimuli
• e.g. birds learn to ignore scarecrows
• e.g. people become unaware of continuous noise or constant smell

Question 2

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 2

• it is learning to respond naturally to a stimulus that doesn’t normally cause that response
• a natural stimulus is called the unconditioned stimulus and it can cause a natural response (an unconditioned response)
• e.g. a dog will salivate in response to food
• if another stimulus coincides with an unconditioned stimulus enough times, eventually this other stimulus will cause the same response
• e.g. If a bell is rung immediately before dogs are given food after a time dogs will learn to salivate in response to the bell only

Question 3

What is operant conditioning?

Answer 3

• it is learning to associate a particular response with a reward or punishment
• when put in the same situation lots of times an animal will work out which response gets a reward or a punishment
• e.g. a rat was put in a cage with a choice of levers, pressing one of the levers rewarded the rat with food straight away and the otter lever gave the rat a shock, the rat was repeatedly put in the same cage so learned which lever to press to get the reward
• lots of mistakes are made at first but animals quickly learn to make fewer mistakes by using trial and error

Question 4

What is latent learning?

Answer 4

• animals will explore new surroundings and retain information about their surroundings that is not of immediate use but may be essential for staying alive at some future time such ad escaping predators or finding food
• e.g. rabbits explore burrows and can be life saving to escape a predator in later life

Question 5

What is insight learning?

Answer 5

• it is learning to solve a problem by working out a solution using previous experience
• e.g. Chimpanzees were put in a play area with sticks, clubs and boxes , bunches of bananas were hung just out of reach. The chimps used their previous experience of playing with the objects to work out a solution - they piled the boxes up to reach the bananas and used sticks and clubs to knock them down

Question 6

What is imprinting?

Answer 6

• a newly born animal has an innate instinct to follow the first moving object it sees usually this would be its mother or father
• but the animal has no innate instinct of what its parent looks like
• imprinting only happens during a certain period of time soon after an animal is born (critical period)
• e.g. ducklings usually imprint on their parent ducks but if ducklings are reared from birth by a human then the human is the first moving object they see so the ducklings imprint on the human and follow them

Question 7

What is learned behaviour?

Answer 7

• It is animal responses that change or adapt with experience
• it is influenced by the environment