Behavior

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Behavior

• Ethology Study of behavior

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 doesnt exactly mean the strongest
• How we feed
• What mate we choose

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Genetic component of behavior

• If genes werent involved behavior wouldnt be
  subject to natural selection and wouldnt 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

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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
  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/techresources/Human_Genome
  /elsi/behavior.shtml3

Not really twins, but hey.
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• Lovebirds show innate behavior modified by
  experience

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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

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• 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

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Example - bird migration
Proximate causes External stimuli- changes in
daylength Internal stimuli - hormone levels

• Ultimate causes - birds that migrate have a
  selective advantage over birds 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.

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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

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Examples of innate behavior

• egg ejection by cuckoos (brood parasites)
• freezing behavior of nestling birds when exposed
  to silhouettes (raptors versus waterfowl)

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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

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Sticklebacks attack red
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Were sensitive to some stimuli more so than
others

• Frogs 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

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Learned behavior

• Learning modification of behavior in response to
  specific experiences

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Learning vs. Maturation

• Doing something faster doesnt mean youve
  learned
• Experiment they kept baby birds from flapping
  their wings until they should be old enough to
  fly and they flew normally and immeadiately.

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Learning Habituation

• Loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli or
  stimuli that dont provide appropriate feedback.
• Banner blindness in web design

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Imprinting

• Lorenzs study
• Chuck Jones study
• Salmon spawn back to stream of their birth from
  ocean
• Olfactory imprinting
• Critical period happens to young and adults

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Conservation issues

• minimize/eliminate human presence while raising
  California Condors

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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 dogs 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
• Methods useful for dealing with phobias

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Learned helplessness

• Results from inescapable punishment
• continued failure may inhibit somebody from
  experiencing agency
• Experiment A dog had earlier been repeatedly
  conditioned to associate a sound with electric
  shocks didnt try (later in another setting) to
  escape the electric shocks after that sound and a
  flash of light was presented, even though all the
  dog would have had to do is jump over a low
  divider. The dog didn't even try to avoid the
  "aversive stimulus" the dog had previously
  "learned" that nothing it did mattered.

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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.

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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.

Im an optimistic Steeler Fan
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Operant conditioning

• Trial and error learning
• B.F. Skinners 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

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Observational Learning

• watch me
• Banduras 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.

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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 arent going to bring home the bacon

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Insight Learning

• Getting it right the first time with no prior
  experience
• Corvidae Crows, ravens, Jays can do similar

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Animal Cognition

• Cognition Ability to be aware and make judgments
  about your environment.
• Are nonhuman animals cognitive?
• Conscious?
• Do they feel pain?
• Are they humiliated when we dress them up?
• Are animals just computer programs?
• They cant think to the ability we can
• Is this a question of degrees?

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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 others
  perceptions of it

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• Jay Gould of Harvard reported bees forming
  mental maps of foraging areas
• Most people who spend time with animals feel that
  they can think.
• Implications about how you view mankinds
  position in the world.

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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?

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Sleep

• No doc. Cases of humans 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 ability 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
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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.

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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

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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

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• 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
• Nothings been firmly established