LEARNING AND MEMORY

DEFINITIONS  Behaviour is action that alters the relationship between an organism and its environment.  Caused by:  External stimulus  Internal stimulus  Both

INNATE BEHAVIOUR  ‘Behaviour determined by the "hard-wiring" of the nervous system’.  Usually inflexible  This elaborate response is "built in" and not something that must be acquired by practice.

EXAMPLES  Taxes: when organisms respond to a stimulus by automatically moving directly toward or away from or at some defined angle to it.  Reflexes: an action that is performed without conscious thought as a response to a stimulus.  Instincts: complex behaviour patterns which, like reflexes, are inborn and inflexible. The entire body participates in instinctive behaviour, and an elaborate series of actions may be involved.

LEARNED BEHAVIOUR  ‘Behaviour that is more or less permanently altered as a result of the experience of the individual organism  i.e. learning to ride a bike or to play an instrument or teaching a dog new tricks

HABITUATION  Habituation is a reduction in a previously-displayed response when no reward or punishment follows.  Means animals don’t waste time and energy responding to unimportant stimuli  Animals still stay alert to important stimuli though (stimuli which might threaten their survival)  The lack of response is long lasting

SENSITISATION  Sensitization is an increase in the response to an innocuous stimulus when that stimulus occurs after a punishing stimulus  Consider touching the gills of the sea slug Aplysia

CONDITIONING  The conditioned response is a response that — as a result of experience — comes to be caused by a stimulus different from the one that originally triggered it.  Ivan Pavlov and his meat powder

INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING AND TRIAL AND ERROR LEARNING  Pavlov's dogs were restrained and the response being conditioned (salivation) was innate.  But the principles of conditioning can also be used to train animals to perform tasks that are not innate.  In these cases, the animal is placed in a setting where it can move about and engage in different activities  The experimenter chooses to reward only one of these

IMPRINTING  Imprinting is phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behaviour  Konrad Lorenz and his imprinted goslings

LATENT LEARNING  What I learned remains hidden  The behaviour is only obvious when it is used by the animal

INSIGHT LEARNING  Requires thought about the problem and consideration of the situation to arrive at a solution very suddenly  not the result of trial and error, responding to an environmental stimulus, or the result of observing someone else attempting the problem.

DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITY  occur when an animal experiences high motivation for two or more conflicting behaviours  i.e. fight or flight  the resulting displacement activity is usually unrelated to the competing motivations.

WHAT IS A MEMORY?  Process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse  Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins  The production of new proteins can only occur when the RNA that will make the required proteins is turned on  When synapses got activated, one of the proteins wrapped around that silencing complex gets degraded  Protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand

WHAT IS A MEMORY?  The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.