Animal Behavior types

Presented by
Abdul Qahar Buneri
AWKUM (BUNER CAMPUS)
What Is Behavior?
 Behavior is what an animal does and how it
does it.
 Learning is also considered a behavioral
process.
 Pioneers of ethology:
1:Learning
 Learning is the modification of behavior
based on specific experiences.
 Learned behaviors range from very
simple to very complex.
 Progress over time tends to follow
learning curves. Learning is not
compulsory; it is contextual. It does not
happen all at once, but builds upon and
is shaped by what we already know
Types of learning

 1:Habituation
 2:Imprinting
 3:Classical conditioning
 4:trial and error learning
 5:latent learning
 6:insight
 7:resoning
 8:congintion
Let study

detail
1:Habituation
 Habituation is a
loss of
responsiveness to
stimuli that convey
little or no
information.
 If a noxious
stimulus is applied,
the animal becomes
sensitized to the
stimulus.
 OR
Habituation is a decrease in response to a
stimulus after repeated presentations.
•EXPLANATION:
The habituation process is a form of adaptive
behavior that is classified as non associative
learning.
• Habituation is the decrease of a response to
a repeated eliciting stimulus that is not due to
sensory adaption or motor fatigue.
 Sensory adaptation occurs when an animal
can no longer detect the stimulus as
efficiently as when first presented and
motor fatigue suggests that an animal is
able to detect the stimulus but can no
longer respond efficiently
 Habituation as a nonassociative process,
however, is a learned adaption to the
repeated presentation of a stimulus, not a
reduction in sensory or motor ability
 The characteristics first described by
Thompson and SpenceR.
 Repeated presentation of a stimulus will
cause a decrease in reaction to the
stimulus
 Habituation is learned behavior which
allows animal to disregard meaningless
stimuli;
• ignore repeated, irrelevant stimulus
Examples of habituation

 Prairie dogs, Cynomys ludovicianus,

give alarm calls when mammals, large
birds, or snakes approach.
 Individual prarie dogs are particularly
susceptible to becoming food for a
coyote, hawk, or rattlesnake, but
collectively they are quite well-defended,
as their alarm calls facilitate escape in
burrows.
 When prairie dog towns are located near
trails used by humans, giving alarm calls
every time a person walks by is a waste
of time and energy for the group.
 Habituation to humans is an important
adaptation in this context
Examples of habituation
 classic example of habituation is the following observation
on the snail Helix albolabris.
 If the snail is moving along a wooden surface, it will
immediately withdraw into its shell if the experimenter taps
on the surface.
 It emerges after a pause, only to withdraw again if the tap is
repeated.
 But continued repetition of the same tapping at regular
intervals elicits a briefer and more perfunctory withdrawal
response.
 Eventually, the stimulus, which initially elicited a clear-cut,
immediate response, has no detectable effect on the snail’s
behaviour. Habituation has occurred.
2:Imprinting
 Imprinting is a type
of behavior that
includes both
learning and innate
components and is
generally
irreversible.
 form of learned
behavior closely
associated with
instinct
Imprinting
 Imprinting is distinguished from other types
of learning by a sensitive period – a
limited phase in an animal’s development
that is the only time when certain behaviors
can be learned.
 A rapid learning process by which a
newborn or very young animal establishes
a behavior pattern of recognition and
attraction to another animal of its own kind
or to a substitute or an object identified as
the parent.
 Itwas first reported in domestic chickens
, by the 19th-century amateur biologist
Douglas Spalding. It was rediscovered
by the early ethologist Oskar Heinroth
, and studied extensively and
popularized by his disciple
Konrad Lorenz working with
greylag geese
 organism will acquire a specific behavior
if an appropriate stimulus is experienced
during a critical period
 limited time interval of life of animal,
usually within a few hours after birth (or
hatching)
 between 13–16 hours shortly after
hatching
Imprinting
 An example of imprinting is young geese
following their mother.
Imprinting
 Konrad Lorenz
showed that when
baby geese spent
the first few hours
of their life with
him, they
imprinted on him
as their parent.
Imprinting
Imprinting

 Conservation biologists have taken

advantage of imprinting in programs to
save the whooping crane from
extinction.
Imprinting
 Young male white-crowned sparrows learn
their song by listening to their father.
A bird raised in isolation will have an abnormal
song.
 Ifhe hears a recording of the song during a critical
period, he will learn it – even the local dialect.
 He can only learn the song of his species.
3:conditional learning

 By 'conditional learning', me mean

where someone is conditioned to
behave in a particular way by rewards
and punishments
 a process in which an animal learns to
respond to a stimulus which doesn’t
normally elicit that response
 Ivan Pavlov provided the most famous example
of classical conditioning, though E. B. Twitmyer
published his findings a year earlier (a case of
simultaneous discovery). During his research on
the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov
noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the
presence of food, the dogs began to salivate in
the presence of the lab technician who normally
fed them. Pavlov called this anticipatory
salivation psychic secretion
 From this observation he predicted that, if a
particular stimulus in the dog's surroundings was
present when the dog was given food, then this
stimulus would become associated with food and
cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment,
Pavlov used a bell to call the dogs to their food and,
after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in
response to the bell. Pavlov called the bell
the conditioned (or conditional) stimulus (CS)
because its effect depended on its association with
food. He called the food the unconditioned
stimulus (US) because its effect did not depend on
previous experience
 Likewise, the response to the CS was
the conditioned response (CR) and that to the
US was the unconditioned response (UR).
 The timing between the presentation of the CS
and US is integral to facilitating the conditioned
response. Pavlov found that the shorter the
interval between the bell's ring and the
appearance of the food, the more quickly the
dog learned the conditioned response and the
stronger it was
4:Trial and error

 Trial and error, or trial by error, is a

heuristic method of problem solving,
repair, tuning, or obtaining knowledge.
"Learning doesn't happen from failure
itself but rather from analyzing the
failure, making a change, and then trying
again.
 Trial and error is not to be confused
with experiment
Trial and error learning

Thorndike
1898, 1911
Thorndike’s puzzle-box experiment

 Thorndike put a hungry cat in a ‘puzzle

box’ and placed fish outside the box
where it could be seen, but was out of
reach.
 In order to escape from the box to get
the food, the cat had to operate a latch
to release a door on the side of the box.
 Through a process of trial and error the
cat learned that pushing the lever
opened the door.
5: Latent learning

 Latent learning is a form of learning that is

not immediately expressed in an overt
response; it occurs without any
obvious reinforcement of the behavior or
associations that are learned
 Interest in latent learning arose largely
because the phenomenon seemed to
conflict with the widely-held view that
reinforcement was necessary for learning to
occur.
 learning that is not the result of
determined effort and is not evident at
the time it occurs, but remains latent
until a need for it arises.
 In a classical experiment by Edward C.
Tolman, three groups of rats were
placed in mazes and their behavior was
observed each day for more than two
weeks. The rats in Group 1 always found
food at the end of the maze; the rats in
Group 2 never found food; and the rats
in Group 3 found no food for 10 days,
but then received food on the eleventh.
 The Group 1 rats quickly learned to rush
to the end of the maze; Group 2 rats
wandered in the maze but did not
preferentially go to the end. Group 3
acted the same as the Group 2 rats until
food was introduced on Day 11; then
they quickly learned to run to the end of
the maze and did as well as the Group 1
rats by the next day.
 Other experiments showed that latent
learning can happen in shorter amounts of
time such as in three or seven days.
 Among other early results, it was also
found that animals that were allowed to
wander in the maze but were detained for
one minute in the empty goal box then
learned the maze much more rapidly than
groups that were not given such goal
orientation.
 In mice,
knowledge of the immediate
environment of its burrow may help it
escape from a
predator. At the time of acquiring this
knowledge, it ha no apparent value, hence
not all
behavioral activities are apparently
directed to satisfying a need or obtaining a
reward
 Metzgar has shown latent learning
process moght work in natyre for the
deer mouse.
 Only two of twenty deer mouse with prior
experience in the hall were caught by
the owl, while eleven of twenty mice with
no prior experience in the habit were
captured
6:insight,

 insight, in learning theory, immediate

and clear learning or understanding that
takes place without overt trial-and-error
testing. Insight occurs in human learning
when people recognize relationships (or
make novel associations between
objects or actions) that can help them
solve new problems.
 OR
A type of learning that uses reason,
especially to form conclusions, inferences,
or judgments, to solve a problem. Insight
learning is based on advanced perceptual
abilities such as thought and
reasoning. Kohlar’s work on
chimpanzees suggested insight learning:
 Much of the scientific knowledge
concerning insight derives from work
on animal behaviour that was conducted by
20th-century
German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang
Köhler. In one experiment Köhler placed a
banana outside the cage of a hungry
chimpanzee, Sultan, and gave the animal
two sticks, each too short for pulling in the
food but joinable to make a single stick of
sufficient length
 Sultan tried unsuccessfully to use each
stick, and he even used one stick to
push the other along to touch the
banana. Later, apparently after having
given up, Sultan accidentally joined the
sticks, observed the result, and
immediately ran with the longer tool to
retrieve the banana.
 When the experiment was repeated,
Sultan joined the two sticks and solved
the problem immediately..
7:reasoning

 thedrawing of inferences or conclusions

through the use of reason

OR
Evidence or arguments used in thinking or
argumentation.
 Humans possess the power
of reasoning.
 First Known Use of REASONING

14th century
 the reasons, arguments, proofs, etc., res
ulting from this process.
8:Animal Cognition

 Cognition is the ability of an animal’s

nervous system to perceive, store,
process, and use information gathered
by sensory receptors.
Agonistic behaviour
 The logic of fighting is decidedly suspect in
most cases.
 One animal is going to win and the other will
lose.
 The loser has gained nothing, and may well
have sustained disastrous injury.
 Relatively minor injury is likely to have fatal
consequences by preventing capture of prey or
allowing a predator to catch an individual with,
for example, a slight muscle strain.
 Even the winner may be damaged, and must
balance the risk of injury with the potential
gain in food, territory or mating success.
 Threat displays allow animals to assess the
likelihood of winning or losing before actually
taking the risk of battle.
 Agonistic behaviour is social behaviour
consisting of threats and combat that settles
disputes between individuals in a population.
 Rituals involving agonistic behaviour often
resolve confrontations between competitors.
 Agonistic behaviour can directly affect an
individual's evolutionary fitness.
 The victor often gains first or exclusive access
to mates, food, etc.
 Threat displays usually involve displaying
either strength or weaponry to the full.
 This is usually enough for the smaller or
weaker to realise that further conflict would
be pointless.
Animal Cognition
 Problem solving can be learned by
observing the behavior of other animals.
THANKS