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-Important for an organism's survival and for the sucessful reproduction of offspring
-may enable one animal to oucompete others of its own species
-ethology (the study of....and its evolutionary origins) |
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-Innate behavior
-continued until completion
-triggered by a sign stimulus |
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-process where the responses of an organism are modified as a result of experience
-capacity to leard is tied to brain capacity and life span
-an animal with minimal brain power and/or short life span must rely on fixed action patterns |
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-simplist form of learning
-animal learns to ignore persistent stimulus
-may increase fitness by allowing an animal to focus on real dangers, not irrelevant stimuli |
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| -type of learning in which one stimulus becomes linked to another through experience |
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-trial and error learning
-an animal learns to associate one of its own behaviors with reward or punishment and then repeats or avoids that behavior |
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| -ex: dogs naturally salivate at the sight of food; Ivan Pavlov taught dogs to associate the sound of a bell with food by repeatedly ringing a bell before he fed the animals |
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-occurs during a sensitive period in the early life of an individual and is irreversible
-Konrad Lorenz experimented involving geese hatchlings and imprinting |
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-enables a behavior to be done as a group more successfully than each can do alone
-ex: hunting in packs |
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-aggressive behavior involving a variety of threats or actual combat
-disputes can be over food, mating, or shelter |
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-pecking order
-top ranked animal= alpha animal |
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-protecting ones own territory for purposes of capturing food, mating, and rearing young
-established by agonistic behavior |
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| -reduces an individual's reproductive fitness but increases the fitness of the group or family that shares many of the genes with the animal performing this behavior |
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-known for extensive studies of honeybee communication
-described the honeybee's waggle dance which communicates both direction to and distance from food to other bees in the hive |
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