Week 2 - Brief history of the study of animal behaviour and neuroscience

Question 1

What are some uses of knowledge of animal behaviour to prehistoric humans?

Answer 1

• Hunter-gatherer human societies interacted often with animals as animals were sources of food and sources of danger
• Hunters would track animals through bush and scrub until the animal collapsed in exhaustion
• Homo Sapiens possess high thermal tolerance, energy-efficient gait, and an unparalleled capacity to sweat for evaporative cooling
• Knowledge of prey behaviour complements endurance running in persistence hunting. Hunters’ knowledge helps them decide which prey to target in which conditions

Question 2

How did dogs get domesticated, according to current scientific thinking?

Answer 2

• Wolves first self-domesticated by daring to scavenge for scraps near human camps
• At some point in time humans then decided to systematically breed them to cooperate with them in hunting - evidence leads to the fact that dogs went along with humans on hunts
• Through domestication the behaviour of the dogs changed - they became more sensitive to humans and their commands

Question 3

How was Rene Descartes significant to the study of behaviour?

Answer 3

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a philosopher, mathematician and scientist
• He proposed the concept of a reflex to explain certain behaviours. While Descartes thought that reflexes were mediated by our pineal gland, an idea now known to be wrong, the concept of a reflex remains in today’s lexicon of animal behaviour
• Descartes’ emphasis on the reflex led him to view animals’ behaviour, and some human behaviour as well, as inflexible machine-like mechanisms
• Descartes also pioneered reductionism - a reductive explanation furnishes some account of a phenomenon at a more detailed level
• explaining phenomena at a lower, more detailed level - neuroscience is a reductionist discipline
• Cartesian coordinates are reductionist - reduces geometry to algebra, a huge intellectual achievement

Question 4

How was Luigi Galvani significant to the study of neuroscience?

Answer 4

• Physician Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) accidentally touched a frog nerve with an electrostatically charged implement, and caused the frog’s leg to kick
• Further studies by Galvani and others following him confirmed the electrical nature of nervous transmission

Question 5

How was Otto Loewi significant to the study of neuroscience?

Answer 5

• Otto Loewi (1873-1961) - discovery took place in 1921 - he took two preparations of frog’s hearts, one had a vagus nerve attached and the other did not
• In the donor heart he stimulated the vagus nerve and the heart rate slowed, he then removed the fluid sample and added it to the recipient heart which slowed the heartbeat down - thus indicating chemical process in nervous transmission

Question 6

How did neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield contribute to the study of behavioural neuroscience?

Answer 6

• Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) would poke areas of the brain to map sensations and find consciousness
• Different parts of the cerebral cortex were found to send signals to different parts of the body

Question 7

What is comparative psychology and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

Answer 7

• Comparative psychology refers to the study of all aspects of the psychology of different species and organisms

Strength:
- superb experimental control

Weakness:
- unnatural, artificial situations, lack of attention to evolution

Question 8

Edward Thorndike’s significance to comparative psychology?

Answer 8

Edward Thorndike conducted experiments that involved cats in puzzle boxes and chicks in mazes - he concluded that cats were making decisions based on the reward outcome of their actions - foundation of operant conditioning

Question 9

B.F. Skinner’s significance to comparative psychology?

Answer 9

• Skinner fabricated apparatuses known as operant chambers to dispense stimuli and rewards and record designated behaviours of animal

Question 10

What is Ivan Pavlov’s significance to comparative psychology?

Answer 10

• discovered classical conditioning
• discovered that animals’ brains connect events in the world that predict other, biologically important events such as the arrival of food or predators
• During his studies on the digestive systems of dogs, Pavlov noted that the animals salivated naturally upon the presentation of food

Question 11

What is ethology and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

Answer 11

• Ethology is the biological study of animal behaviour
• It was founded by Von Frisch, Tinbergen and Lorenz
• Ethology focused on natural behaviours such as escaping from predators, foraging, mating, parenting, and navigating. It also focused on behaviour in the natural habitats of the animals
• Observations of natural behaviour were paramount and the focus, but experiments were not avoided

Strengths:

• focus on natural behaviour
• considers evolutionary process

Weakness:
- often lacking control

Question 12

What are the modern offshoots of comparative psychology?

Answer 12

1. behavioural neuroscience

2. comparative cognition

Question 13

What are the modern offshoots of ethology?

Answer 13

1. neuroethology

2. behavioural ecology

Question 14

What is behavioural neuroscience?

Answer 14

• The study of how brains and nervous systems contribute to behaviour - mostly in lab animals
• Done through the method of:
  1. Lesions
  2. Pharmacology
  3. Records from the brain

Question 15

What is comparative cognition?

Answer 15

• Expanding comparative psychology of learning to complex learning
• field of inquiry concerned with understanding the cognitive abilities and mechanisms that are evident in nonhuman species

Question 16

What is neuroethology?

Answer 16

• Focuses on the neural basis of natural behaviours
• escape, feeding, signal sending and receiving, navigation: focus on mechanism
• a lot of lab work, some field work behaviour
• e.g. song learning in birds, flight control in butterflies

Question 17

What is behavioural ecology?

Answer 17

• Focuses on function and evolution of behaviour
• Mostly field based studies
• However, it often lacks experimental control and suffers from a replicability crisis
• control over developmental history and experimental conditions in the field is often lacking
• The behavioural ecologist can figure out the ways in which a behaviour is adaptive, but sometimes has no idea how the animal in question generates the behaviour (mechanistic questions), the brain and cognitive systems of the animal remaining an unexamined black box

Question 18

What are the 4 whys that Niko Tinbergen proposed?

Answer 18

Centres around different forms of asking why an animal did something.

• He distinguished 4 different senses of why
  1. Mechanism - a how question, concerned with present stimuli and underlying mechanisms that generate a behaviour. Environmental factors can module behaviour. Decisions and motor output.
  2. Development - processes in the course of an animals life that contribute to a behaviour.
• experiences
• genetic makeup
• mapping of life trajectories onto developmental outputs
  3. Function - the adaptive advantage granted by a behaviour.
• adaptive value
• survival value, reproductive value
• balance of benefits against the cost
  4. Evolution - how did the behaviour come about in the evolution of life. Evolutionary questions need to be answered by comparing currently living species with a map indicating how species are related to one another through evolution.
• usually requires some comparison across species

Question 19

What is the mechanism that desert ants on a featureless salt pan use to navigate?

Answer 19

• The ant keeps track of her outbound path as she travels, basically keeping track of the straight-line distance and direction home during her meandering
• process is called path integration
• The desert ant uses the pattern of polarised light and the position of the sun in the sky as compass. Light entering the atmosphere of Earth is scattered in a systematic fashion; this makes polarised light
• To estimate the distance travelled, an oversimplified explanation is that the desert ant counts the number of steps that she takes in a particular direction

Question 20

What did Tinbergen’s experiment suggest was the function of egg shell removal in gulls?

Answer 20

• Tinbergen noticed that gulls nesting on the ground remove broken egg shells from the area of their nest after a chick hatched
• Tinbergen concluded that the presence of broken egg shells may give the location of the nest away - this would make it easier for predators to spot the nest
• Tinbergen tested this theory and his hypothesis was supported

Question 21

What is the functional explanation for why some desert ants only forage during short periods of the day?

Answer 21

• They do this to avoid predators

- The squeeze between lizards and deadly heat

Question 22

What is trichromacy?

Answer 22

• possession of three independent channels for conveying colour information, derived from the three different types of cone cells in the eye
• 3 colour receptor types
• Humans share trichromatic colour vision with lots of primates such as monkeys

Question 23

Summary of 4 whys

Answer 23

Mechanism: how does it work? triggering stimuli?

Development: what happens over an individuals life?

Function: what is it good for?

Evolution: what is the course of phylogenetic history?