Behaviour in Terms of Function

Catalyst: Equitana - ABC TV Shown on 19/2/2009 Equitana, the way of the horse is turbo-charged animal behaviour. It’s a high stakes, nail-biting, horse-breaking competition; played out in front of an expectant audience and an exacting panel of judges at the biggest horse event in the southern hemisphere. Only this time, the scientists are there - taking on the cowboys on their own turf.
If link does not work search for - Equitana
Lecture Notes
Classifying Behaviour - Innate and learned

Note Template

Also read Chapter 17.1 and 17.2 of text book.
Which of the below do you think is more ethical?
Anthropomorphism
Animal behaviour
Cats hate water so will putting bathers and swimming
cap on them make them swim?
cat.jpg
Exploring animal behaviour the scientific way. Can birds have emotions?
Compass Paws for Thought (2000)
In Armidale, New South Wales, Lesley Rogers’s and Gisela Kaplan’s work with animals is rewriting the scientific understanding of how animals behave and communicate. Kaplan describes how they must teach a captured young tawny frogmouth owl how to hunt and what to do when it has caught its prey. The bird does not know this instinctively but must learn from its parent – in this case, Gisela – how to live in the wild.

Innate Behaviour


What innate behaviours are we born with?

Imprinting is where an innate pattern of behaviour (eg following a large moving object) becomes associated with a particular stimulus (eg the particular mother that the bird sees).

Konrad Lorenz

Learned Behaviour


Habituation

Habituation of a startle response

Classical Conditioning ( Associative Learning)


Pavlov's Experiments with dogs

John Watson experiments with humans
Little Albert

Trial and error learning


Operant learnng
Skinner's **box**

More Complex Learned Behaviours


Operant learnng
Example of changing behaviour with rewards

Changing Behaviour in dogs

Observational learning

A demonstration of an octopus learning from observation

Insight learning in pigeons

Insight Learning: This is an extension of the term, insight which was identified by Wolfgang Kohler while studying the behavior of chimpanzees. He said that insight learning is a type of learning or problem solving that happens all-of-a-sudden through understanding the relationships various parts of a problem rather than through trial and error.

Sultan, one of Kohler's chimpanzes, learned to use a stick to pull bananas from outside of his cage by putting pieces of stick together. Given two sticks that could be fitted together to make a single pole that was long enough to reach the bananas, aligned the sticks and in a flash of sudden inspiration, fitted the two sticks together and pulled in the bananas. He didn't do this by trial and error, but had a sort of sudden inspiration or insight.

The role of stimulus preexposure in problem solving by octopus