Animal Behaviours

What is behaviour?

The observable actions (or inactions) of animals, including how they interact with their environments, conspecifics, and other species

T/F: Not all behaviours are intentional

True - they may also be driven by motivation

What is the Dead Man’s Test?

If a dead man can do it, it is not behaviour

Who emphasized that behaviour was subject to natural selection?

Darwin and Romanes

Romanes is introduced ___________________ focusing on animal intelligence and learning (made more rigorous by Lloyd Morgan)

Comparative psychology

What is comparative psychology?

the scientific study of similarities and differences in the behavior, cognition, and mental processes of different species, including humans and non-human animals

• focuses on understanding evolutionary, developmental, and functional aspects of behavior

• often applies principles from ethology and biology to explore learning, memory, and social interactions

Who are the founders of behaviourism?

Watson, Pavlov, and Skinner

• Note: Behaviourism = stimulus response learning

Who is associated with classical ethology (studied a wide variety of
behaviour in natural habitats)?

Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch

When did ethology and comparative psychology begin to merge?

After WWII

What are Darwin’s two fundamental tenets?

1. Behaviour is an adaptation

2. Behaviour resulted from selection pressures operating in the past

Ex. Death feigning in red flour beetles

What is the Farm-Fox Experiment? (Belyaev et al. - silver foxes)

• Foxes selected and sorted according to tameness

• Tame foxes were bred

• Selection proved to change morphological features seen in dog domestication

• Take-Home: can select for tameness and other traits

• Debated as previous experiment (unknown at time) may have impacted results

Describe George Romanes take on early comparative psychology

• advocate for natural selection

• compare animal intelligence across species

• continuity for mental traits, perception, memory, and problem solving

• Used anecdotes and prone to anthropomorphism and over-interpretation: rats forming supply lines, monkey showing a hunter blood on its hand

Describe Lloyd Morgan’s take on early comparative psychology

• continuation of comparative psychology - but emphasized experimentation

• work laid the foundations for ethology

• simple > complex

What is Morgan’s Canon?

“But surely simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth”

• simple > complex

• emphasizes that all else being equal, simpler explanations are preferred

What did Clever Hans (horse that “solves” math) teach us?

• need for strict controls - isolation from handlers

• benefits of blind and double blind experiments

• against researcher expectations that influence results of live subjects

Relevance to bias in artificial intelligence

What is behaviourism?

theory focusing on observable behaviors as learned responses to environmental stimuli, emphasizing that actions are shaped by conditioning (rewards/punishments)

What are the key points of behaviourism?

• Lab animals and experiments (to avoid ‘uncontrollable’ chaos of natural environment)

• Emphasized need for systematic, replicable experiments

• Behaviours considered simple reflexes linked by conditioning

• Considered animals ‘black boxes’, ‘tabulae rasa’

• Not interested in ‘why’ an animal was selected to behave

• Interested in mechanisms of learning (conditioning, positive and negative reinforcement)

Describe the work of John Watson

• founder of behaviourism

• mental states are not scientifically measurable

• focuses on learning

• humans are shaped solely by the environment

What was John Watson’s view on mental states?

mental states are not scientifically measurable and behaviour should be the focus

What was the “Little Albert” experiment?

conditioned "Little Albert," to fear a white rat (a neutral stimulus) by
repeatedly pairing it with a loud noise (an unconditioned stimulus) indicating that fear, could be learned

What researcher is associated with the infamous “Little Albert” experiment?

John Watson

What behaviour does behaviourism emphasize?

Stimulus-response learning and conditioning

Describe the work of Ivan Pavlov

• Classical Conditioning

  • Pavlov’s dog (physiology of digestion) - taught dogs to drool at the sound of a bell

• Conditioned and unconditioned stimuli

What is the difference between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli?

An unconditioned stimulus (US) triggers a natural, automatic, unlearned response (unconditioned response), like food causing salivation

A conditioned stimulus (CS) is a previously neutral stimulus that, after being paired with a unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a learned response (conditioned response), like a bell (CS) causing salivation after being paired with food (US)

Key difference is the involvement of learning: US is innate, while CS requires association