1. Animal Behavior

2. Don’t write - just think about this…
Why do all humans smile?
How do sea turtles find their homes?
Why do baby birds open their mouth wide?
Why do dolphins play?
Why do birds sing?

3. How?
How does an animal do something?
How do you behave?

4. Why?
Why does this behavior occur?
Why do you do that?

5. Behavior Performed in response to a stimulus
Stimulus: any kind of signal that carries information and can be detected
Response: a single specific reaction

6. Types of stimuli From your senses: sensory neurons
Endocrine: response to hormones

7. Behavior
Animals with little to no brain matter have very simple responses
Taxis: an innate behavior
Earthworm moves from light
In response to light, temperature, chemicals etc…

8. Innate behavior Instinct or inborn behavior
Appear fully functional the first time they are performed, even though they may have never encountered this
Spider builds a web
Human baby suckles
Baby bird opens mouth wide for food

9. Learned behavior Acquired behaviors
Can alter their behavior as a result of experience reward or punishment
Toad sees something move it eats it
Eats millipede (tastes bad) & learns to avoid it

10. 4 types of learned behaviors
Habituation
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Insight Learning

11. Habituation
A process by which an animal decreases or stops its response to a repetitive stimulus
No reward or harm
Get used to it and then ignore it
Birds near road

12. Classical Conditioning
A mental connection between a stimulus and some kind of reward or punishment
A dog has experience with toys, sees a ball, expects to play: reward
A dog sees a newspaper will hide, thinks it might get hit

13. An example of Classical Conditioning…
Ivan Pavlov
Russian physiologist studying digestion
Dogs salivate - innate behavior
Pavlov rang a bell every time before he fed his dog
Bell ( stimulus)
Food (reward)
Eventually he could simply ring a bell and the dog salivated

14. Operant conditioning Used for training animals
Learns to behave in a certain way through repeated practice for a reward or to avoid punishment
Trial and error

15. An example of Operant Conditioning…
B.F. Skinner
“Skinner box”
Rat pressed a bar correct number of times received a treat
Learned that the bar= a treat

16. Insight Reasoning Applies something already learned to a new situation
Given a new math problem have to use the methods you already learned
Hard for most animals to do this type of behavior

17. Imprinting Innate and learned behavior
Serves to keep animals close to mom and close to food & home range
Occurs in a specific time in young animals
Afterward irreversible

18. Imprinting examples
Birds learn to follow the first large moving object they see, but then they must remember which object that is
Baby mammals recognize their mother through sight and smell
Salmon use smell to imprint on which stream they hatched from so they can find it again