A.4 – Innate and learned behavior

Examples of Innate Behavior All organisms have innate behaviors that are inherited from parents that develop independently from the environment Innate behavior is inherited from an individual’s parents and is not modified by the individual and is generally not affected by the organism’s environment, including an organism’s experiences. For this reason, innate behaviors are often uniform and have low variation within a single population. Beneficial Innate behavior evolves through natural selection, survival, and reproduction, and therefore the frequency of beneficial traits will be seen to increase over time.. Suckling response in mammals Examples of Innate Behavior Migration in Canadian geese

All organisms have innate behaviors that are inherited from parents that develop independently from the environment Taxis Kinesis A directional movement in response to a particular stimulus A nondirectional movement when an invertebrate encounters a stimulus in terms of speed of the movement and the number of turns it makes. Examples: Woodlice – Orthokinesis (Speed of movement dictated by the intensity of the stimulus) Woodlice exhibit increasingly stationary behavior with increased amounts of humidity Flatworms – Klinokinesis (Frequency of turning is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus) Flatworms turn much more frequently in response to increasing light to ensure more time spent in the dark. Examples: Earthworms – Hydrotaxis (Movement in relation to water) Earthworms move towards water Pillbugs – Negative phototaxis (Movement in relation to light) Pillbugs move away from light

Learning is the acquisition of a skill or knowledge Learning is the acquisition of a skill or knowledge. Learned behavior develops only as a result of experience. Based on the set of experiences in an animal’s life, they can learn (primarily through trial and error) Since learning is individual, learned behavior will be highly diverse throughout a population. A particular organism’s capacity to learn is partially genetic, but without the experiences, there is no learning. Example: African Grey Parrot and other pets can learn social cues and acquire language through training

Autonomic or involuntary responses are referred to as reflexes. These reflexes are always in response to an internal or external change that is detected by a receptor and elicits a response – AKA, a stimulus. A reflex is a rapid unconscious response to a stimulus. Examples: Patellar reflex, pupil reflex The pathway that carries this message is known as a reflex arc, and is comprised of the neurons that mediate reflexes. Outline of reflex arc: - Stimulus hits skin - Signal is sent by sensory neuron to the spinal cord, where it synapses with the relay/interneuron in the grey matter - The relay neuron synapses with the motor neuron and a signal is sent to the effector (muscle) - Muscle contracts and hand is moved away from stimulus

Reflex conditioning involves forming new associations. This has been shown through a number of studies in reflex conditioning with dogs. The most famous of these experiments was done by a scientist known as Ivan Pavlov, who conditioned his dogs to salivate when hearing a bell. After many months of ringing the bell before supper time, the bell became a conditioned stimulus, and generated a conditioned response. This process of changing an unconditioned response to a conditioned response is known as reflex conditioning. An innate response from a dog is to salivate when presented with food to begin digestion. Conditioning works to change the response and replace with a conditioned response.

Operant conditioning is the form of learning that results from trial and error experiences. Often thought of as “positive reinforcement,” operant conditioning functions to reward a behavior that should be repeated and punish a behavior that should be avoided. BF Skinner used operant conditioning to help rats learn to feed themselves through the pushing of a button. In this case, the pushing of the button was completely accidental at first, but after a few accidental pushes, it began to associate the action with the reward of food. Thus – The food is the reinforcement, and the pushing of the lever is the operant response.

Both inheritance and learning play a role in development of a birdsong. Birds learn songs through repetition, similarly to humans, as they develop. Birdsongs are a crucial part of effective communication between members of the same species Interesting enough, though, there are remarkable similarities of a crude template song that is genetically inherited – so the process is exemplary of motor learning, in which there is constant trial and error based on mimicry of the adult population around them.

Memory is the process of encoding, storing and accessing information. Learned behavior is modified by experience, and thus, requires the storing of experiences to recall and process new information. – This is memory. Memories re based on stimuli, and are converted from an initial stimulus to a stored form, such as sounds, sights, physical cues, etc. Memory involves many parts of the brain – including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, and as such, organisms without much development in those regions of the brain have limited memories. Once stored, they enter either the short term or the long term memory.

Imprinting is learning that occurs during a particular life stage and is independent of consequences of behavior. We can see the effects of imprinting in waterfowl particularly, as ducks and geese often will imprint on animals other than their biological mother. Konrad Lorenz was the first ethologist to understand imprinting, and in his famous experiment, had several geese follow him around after they imprinted on him when they were born.

Ethology is the study of animal behavior in natural conditions. Natural selection can change the frequency of observed animal behavior Behavior that increases the chances of survival and reproduction will become more prevalent in a population. Learned behavior can spread through a population or be lost from it more rapidly than innate behavior. Seven examples of unique animal behaviors: Click on the images to a link of their special behavior. Classify each as one of the following: Innate Behavior Learned Behavior Mate Selection Behavior affecting survival and reproduction Optimal Prey choice Altruistic behavior Migratory Behavior