Lecture 7+8 - Learning Flashcards
chapter 9
What are the 4 conditions for the evolution of phenotype plasticity?
- population must have encountered a range of environmental variations over its history.
- there must be different optimal phenotypes in different environments.
- the mapping between the environment and the optimal phenotype must be consistent.
- there must be reliable cues available of what state the environment is in for the organism to want to change (e.g the uv in case of wanting to tan)
How has the ability to learn evolved?
mutation causes variation, where some variation is more likely to be reproduced if it is beneficial and favourable mutations are more likely to survive, thus the population becomes adapted to its environment
What is meant by developmental induction in the context of snailsl?
Developmental induction is a system where snails change their growth patterns based on chemical cues from predators in the water.
Explain why plasticity may not evolve even when conditions are favorable.
Plasticity has costs, such as increased complexity, energy requirements, longer development times, and potential for inappropriate responses to environmental cues.
How do snails raised in different environments exhibit variations in shell shape?
Snails raised in water with pumpkinseed fish develop more rotund shells, while those raised with crayfish or no predators develop elongated shells.
Explain the advantages of developmental induction for snails.
It allows snails to develop the best phenotype for the environment they are born into, depending on the predator cues they sense.
What are the limitations of the developmental induction system in snails?
The system can lead to irreversible growth patterns that may not match the adult environment, resulting in mismatched shell shapes that can be detrimental.
What is meant by filial imprinting?
Filial imprinting is a process, readily observed in precocial birds, whereby a social attachment is established between a young animal and an object that is typically a parent.
What is the evidence of sexual imprinting in humans?
Hungarian married women raised in adoptive families –> there was found more similarity in adoptive father and husband more than woman and her husband. This suggests that women may be imprinting on their fathers and using this as a template for mate choice
What did Lorenz famously show?
he could cause goslings to imprint on him and follow him around as if he were their
mother, as long as he was close to them in a critical period in the first few days of life.
Instrumental conditioning is also called?
operant conditioning
what were the 3 stages of Pavlov’s dog experiment?
- food presented in form of powder in the mouth followed by a tone - salivation.
- tone was followed by presentation of food.
- tone produced salivation
What does instrumental conditioning rely on?
there being a set of outcomes that are intrinsically rewarding or intrinsically unpleasant, to which behaviours can become associated.
What 2 processes did Pavlov suggest learning involved?
an excitatory association(increasing the likelihood of a response) and an inhibitory association(decreases the likelihood of a response)
What 4 things make the ability to develop an aversion to food adaptive?
1 = rapid learning, 2 = long intervals of conditioning i.e. food poisoning, 3 = aversion develops in response to the smell or taste not ingestion, 4 = learning aversions occur more often with novel ones than familiar ones
Explain the example of evolutionary preparedness with rhesus monkeys
captivre-reared rhesus monkeys have no fear of snakes, but wild monkeys do.
if captive monkeys see a film of a wild monkey making a fear to snakes, they learn to avoid them. however they dont learn to avoid if the same reaction was shown to flowers - evolutionary preparadness.
What did noam chomsky suggest?
native language acquisition is a process much more akin to imprinting: the child has an evolutionarily prepared expectation that there will be a language spoken around it and during a critical period of its life it fills
in the template of which language it is by extracting regularities from the stream of speech going on around it.
Explain how young Norway rats learn about food.
Young Norway rats learn about edible foods by observing other rats eat, smelling food on the breath of other rats, or tasting food that their mother has eaten and passed through her milk.
Describe the role of social learning in mate preferences among Japanese quail.
study - a female quail observed another female mating with a male.
This observation led the original female to spend more time with the male who had mated, indicating that she used the information from the other female’s preference in her own decision-making.
When is social learning an adaptive stategy?
When there are other individuals available to learn from, which typically occurs in social species or in situations with ongoing parent-offspring interactions.
Not all social species utilize social learning, and its evolution depends on the costs and benefits associated with it.
What is a significant advantage of social learning?
it allows individuals to acquire information on how to behave adaptively in their local environment without undergoing the costly trial and error process of learning on their own.
e.g. rats can observe what older rats eat to identify safe food without risking poisoning.
What is a potential drawback of social learning?
the behaviors being observed might not be the most beneficial in the current environment.
Observers may learn obsolete behaviors, or the social learners may have different dietary tolerances, making the observed behavior a poor guide for what to do.
What prediction is made regarding the cost of individual learning in relation to social learning?
the more costly it is to learn through individual trial and error, the more advantageous social learning becomes. This is based on the principle that higher costs of individual learning lead to greater savings when acquiring information from others.
Explain the cultural tradition of social learning in black rats.
Black rats, Rattus rattus, living in pine forests in Israel have an efficient method of stripping the scales from pine cones (starting from the bottom) to access the nutritious seeds within.
Rats captured outside pine forests and
given pine cones seldom managed to learn this method, but all rats raised by a forest-raised mother acquired it.
What did Kawai and Ohsawa(1983) find relating to observational learning among Japanese Macaques (Macaca Fuscata)?
one of them washed a sweet potato in water because there was sand on it and many others followed - cumulative cultural evolution.
Explain the spaghetti tower experiment
Caldwell & Millen (2008) set participants the task of building, one person at a time, towers that were as tall as possible from uncooked spaghetti and modelling clay.
Participants had 5 minutes to build their tower, but they could also observe the towers of the previous participants. The next participants could in turn observe their work. Thus, each run of the experiment constituted a miniature tower-building tradition.
What does associative learning rely on?
there existing an intermediate outcome which natural selection has made rewarding because it has tended to be correlated with reproductive success over past environments
What role does learning play in the process of natural selection according to the Baldwin effect?
Learning can guide natural selection by allowing individuals to adapt and signal information, which can enhance reproductive success even when specific genetic mutations are not yet present.
What are the two adaptations necessary for an animal to signal the presence of food to others?
(a) the ability of the animal to produce a call when it finds food
(b) the ability of other individuals to understand the call and respond appropriately.
Why is it unlikely for both adaptations (a) and (b) to arise simultaneously in a population?
it requires very specific mutational changes to occur at the same time, which is statistically rare.
How does learning provide a selective advantage for adaptation (a) before adaptation (b) arises?
Learning allows individuals to understand and respond to the call produced by adaptation (a), providing a selective advantage even in the absence of adaptation (b), which helps adaptation (a) to spread in the population.
What are the two stages of the Baldwin effect?
(1) a capacity to learn fills a gap in a genetically specified system, making it beneficial, and (2) genetic assimilation, where subsequent mutations fill this gap, potentially removing the need for learning.
