Behavior
Ethology:
Study of
behavior
Outline
• Behavior is what an animal does and how it does it
• Behaviors have both ultimate and proximate causes
• Certain stimuli trigger innate behaviors called fixed
action patterns
• Learning is experience based modification of behavior
• Rhythmic behaviors sync. Activities with temporal
changes in the environment
• Environmental cues guide movement
• Sociobiology places social behavior in an evolutionary
context
• Competitive social behaviors often represent contests for
resources
• Mating behavior relates directly to an animals fitness
• Communication
• Inclusive fitness can account for most altruistic behavior
Babies make noise when no one is
around
• Trying to fit their vocalizations to internal
templates?
• Eventually turn into complex sounds
• Communication is the result of genetic
cues modified during development by
environmental factors
• Bird song works like this too
Bird songs vs. calls
• Long vs. Short, arbitrary distinction
• Crows have more than 20 different calls
• Ludwig van Beethoven, for example,
included imitations of the Nightingale,
Quail and Cuckoo in his Symphony No. 6
(the Pastoral).
• Pink Floyd's 1969 albums More and
Ummagumma
Behavior
what an animal does and how it does it
• Study of animal behavior is as old as we
are.
– Need it to hunt
– Cave art a study of behavior?
– Domestication: control of behavior
Early 1900s – Ethology becomes
formal discipline
• Due to work of 3 ethologists
– K. Lorenz studied waterfowl and other
organisms
– N. Tinbergen studied gulls and other
organisms
– K. Von Frisch studied communication in bees
Nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution
• Natural
selection is going
on so animals have to
maximize their fitness
– Recall fitness doesn’t
exactly mean the
strongest
– How we feed
– What mate we choose
Genetic component of behavior
• If genes weren’t involved
behavior wouldn’t be
subject to natural
selection and wouldn’t
change over time
• Genes set up the neural
network that lets us learn.
• Behavioral ecology:
animals increase fitness
by optimal behavior
– Best explanation for the
data
Studying genetic components of
behavior
• Can study twins: If Jacob is
smart is Mack also?
• Can study adoptees. If your
real parents were alcoholics but
your adopted parents are
Not really twins, but hey.
teetotalers what will you be?
• Some example studies
– Novelty seeking personality, ear
wiggling, perfect pitch
– propensity for
smoking,Alcoholism,
homosexuality
– http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresour
ces/Human_Genome/elsi/behavior
.shtml#3
• Lovebirds show
innate behavior
modified by
experience
Behaviors have both ultimate
and proximate causes
• Ultimate cause: Why did this
happen?
• Ultimate causation - historical
explanations
• Explains why a behavior
evolved
• Study by measuring influence
on survival or reproduction
• Proximate cause: How did this happen?
• Proximate causation - immediate causes
– Explains how behavior works - what
stimulates behavior to occur
– Study by measuring or describing the stimuli
that elicit behavior
– Internal - physiological events (hormones,
nervous system)
– External - environmental stimuli
Example - bird migration
Proximate causes
• Ultimate causes - External stimuli-
birds that migrate changes in
have a selective daylength
Internal stimuli -
advantage over birds hormone levels
that don't/didn't,
selected for over time,
could be due to long
term climate changes,
glaciation, disease,
taking advantage of
food sources, etc.
Components of Behavior
• 2 Components
– Nature/innate: instinct and genes determine
behavior
– Nurture/learned: experience and learning
influence behavior
– Two extremes are not mutually exclusive, but
work together to influence behavior
Examples of innate behavior
• egg ejection by
cuckoos (brood
parasites)
• freezing behavior of
nestling birds when
exposed to
silhouettes (raptors
versus waterfowl)
Components of Innate Behavior
• Components of Innate
Behavior
• FAP - fixed action pattern,
all or none response
– Once started most animals
will finish activity even if new
stimuli show the activity to be
inappropriate
– Sign stimulus - causes
release of FAP
• Usually obvious aspect of
morphology
Sticklebacks attack red
We’re sensitive to some stimuli
more so than others
• Frog’s are sensitive to movement of prey
– Will starve if surrounded by dead/unmoving
flies
• Supernormal stimulus: artificial stimuli that
elicit a stronger response
– Oystercatchers will rather incubate a giant
model of an egg instead of the real thing
Learned behavior
• Learning: modification of behavior in
response to specific experiences
Learning vs. Maturation
• Doing something faster doesn’t mean
you’ve learned
• Experiment: they kept baby birds from
flapping their wings until they should be
old enough to fly and they flew normally
and immediately.
Learning: Habituation
• Loss of
responsiveness to
unimportant stimuli
or stimuli that don’t
provide appropriate
feedback.
• Banner blindness in
web design
Imprinting
• Lorenz’s study
• Chuck Jones study
• Salmon spawn back to
stream of their birth from
ocean;
– Olfactory imprinting
• Critical period: happens
to young and adults
Conservation issues
• minimize/eliminate human presence while
raising California Condors
Classical conditioning
• Associative learning: one
stimulus goes with another,
the roar goes with the lion
• Pavlov married the concepts
of feeding and the sound of a
bell in his dog’s mind
• Alpert Watson conditioned an
11 month old orphan named
Alpert to fear rats
• California Sea Slug has
20,000 neurons but can be
habituated, and sensitized
• Method’s useful for dealing
with phobias
Learned helplessness
• Results from inescapable
punishment
• continued failure may inhibit
somebody from experiencing
agency
• They tie a dog down and
associate a shock with a
sound.
• Then in another situation when
the dog can escape, they
make the sound and it doesn’t
try to move.
• The dog had previously
"learned" that nothing it did
mattered.
Learned helplessness
• people doing mental tasks in the presence
of noise.
• Given a switch that would turn off the
noise, performance improved, even
though subject rarely bothered to turn off
the noise.
• being aware of the ability to have control
was enough to substantially counteract its
distracting effect.
Evidence of optimism?
• Not all of the dogs became helpless.
• About 1/3 of the 150 dogs tried to find
ways out of unpleasant experiences even
if they previously had no control.
I’m an optimistic Steeler Fan
Operant conditioning
• Trial and error learning
• B.F. Skinner’s Skinner Box: rat in box with
lever. Push the lever & food comes out. It
learns to push the lever.
• Acetycholine is released through cerebral
cortex as we try things
• In nature: good / bad tastes
– Remember genes tell us what will taste good
and bad, we learn from there
Observational Learning
• “watch me…”
• Bandura’s Bobo doll
experiment: kids who
watched adults beat
up doll also beat up
doll.
•Kid watched Beavis start a fire
•Started fire
•Cartoon makers are now careful to
not create copyable behavior.
Play
• Activity with no goal, but
is similar to goal-directed
behavior.
• Risky behavior
• “practice” hypothesis play
= learning
– But do they really get
better?
• “exercise” hypothesis
– Fat babies aren’t going to
bring home the bacon
Insight Learning
• Getting it right the first
time with no prior
experience
• Corvidae: Crows,
ravens,
Animal Cognition
• Cognition: Ability to be aware
and make judgments about
your environment.
• Are nonhuman animals
cognitive?
– Conscious?
– Do they feel pain?
– Anger? Fear? Sadness? Joy?
– Are they humiliated when we
dress them up?
• Are animals just computer
programs?
• They can’t think to the ability
we can
• Is this a question of degrees?
• Flip the coin: If animals don’t
have meaningful emotion and
its all hardwired, are humans
the same?
Cognitive ethology
• In Donald Griffins
Question of Animal
Awareness, he argued
that animals have
conscious minds like
those of humans.
• Jane Goodall (distantly
related to Mr. Chessman)
studied chimps, saw them
fake injuries to get
attention.
– Lying = thinking about
reality and other’s
perceptions of it
• Jay Gould of Harvard
reported bee’s forming
mental maps of foraging
areas
• Most people who spend
time with animals feel
that they can think.
• Implications about how
you view mankind’s
position in the world.
Rhythms
• Why do you sleep when you
do? How does your body
know to wake up?
– External or internal cues?
– Can you tell yourself to wake
up in 4 hours and do so?
• In controlled environments: all
light, all dark, or twilight
Humans have an internal clock
of around 25 hours
• What about long term things?
If you kept animals in
controlled environments for
years would they mate at the
same time as animals in the
wild?
Sleep
• No doc. Cases of human’s
dying directly from lack of
sleep.
– Maybe from sleep deprived
caused accidents
– Studies of people awake for
10 days shows temporary
decreases in cog. functions,
but nothing long term
– Microsleep
– Can lead to our inability to
metabolize glucose
cause of diabetes
– Rats kept alive for 28 days
die.
Bags under eyes: Inheritable
Etiologies: bone structure, pigments, eye ailments, nutrition,
pregnancy, dehydration, circulation
Fatal Familial Insomnia
• 28 families have it
• Late onset Autosomal dominant:
50/50 chance of inheritance
• Mutates a protein into a prion
• Causes plaques on thalmus;
sleep responsible region
• Progression over 2 years: increasing
insomnia, odd phobias, panic attacks,
hallucinations, panic, agitation and
sweating, dementia, total insomnia and
sudden death after becoming mute.
Movement from external cues
• Kinesis: change in activity
rate in response to stim.
– “Cold” blooded animals
• Taxis: automatic
movement towards or
away from stim.
– Trout orient so they face
upstream
– Geotaxis: King crab larvae
orient down toward the earth
Migration
• How do gold plovers go
13,000 km from arctic to
S. America?
• How do birds find Hawaii
every year?
• Pilot from landmark to
landmark
• Orient yourself on a
straight line for the trip.
• Navigation complex
mental mapping
• Animals navigate like
sailor from sun and stars
• Indigo Bunting orients
on North Star
• Can they sense the
magnetic field?
• Magnetite a magnetic
mineral is found in
heads of some birds,
abdomens of some
bees
• Nothing’s been firmly
established