How animals behave ? - very short presentation about animal behavioral patterns

1. How animals behave
Miroslava Korenova

2. Animal behaviour
How would you define a BEHAVIOUR?
Name some types of animal behaviour
How can you observe a specific types of behaviour?
What is behaviour good for?
Can behaviour be learned?
Or it is innate and animals always react through the same inherited scheme?
Think and discuss...

3. Animal behaviour
 Have you noticed a bird singing early mornings and building a nest at the tree near
your house,
 Have you seen a duck followed by small ducklings,
 Have you heard a wolf howling at the moon,
 Or have you seen a fish swimming in a group formation, ...
If your answer is Yes – Congratulations- you have made your first observation in
behavioural neuroscience !

4. Animal behaviour
 Animals display various kinds of behaviour types, almost all
aspects of life are fulfilled with specific behavioural responses
 Specific behavioural responses were developed to increase animal
ability to survive and reproduce in respect to changing
environmental conditions

5. Animal behaviour
behavioural biology
 Ethology – scientific and objective study of animal (human
also counts!) behaviour – usually focusing on animals living
in natural environment
 Comparative psychology – (experimental ethology) – is
focusing mainly on animals living in isolation (e.g. ZOO,
laboratory conditions)

6. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
These questions were proposed by a Dutch ornitologist Nico Tinbergen. Answers
to these questions will help us to understand any animal behaviour
 What are the mechanisms that cause behaviour?
 How does a particular behaviour develop?
 What is its survival value?
 How did the behaviour evolve? Why?

7. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
 Let us have a look at these questions - one by one..........................................

8. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
 What are the mechanisms that cause behaviour?
What is the trigger – or releaser of specific behaviour? What body parts,
functions are involved?
Example: Bird songs
Birds songs are asssociated with courtship and mating, it has been shown
that quality of a bird song may be a good indicator of physiological fitnes
and health of an individual. So females always are attracted by the best
male singer.
Ability of singing is provided by a special organ – syrinx – a bony structure
at the bottom of the trachea and the frequency of singing is increased
with the presence of male hormones.

9. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
 How does a particular behaviour develop?
Is the behaviour present early in life? Is inborn or gained through life by trial
error learning? Is any experience necessary for its improvement?
Example: Bird song
Early experiments proved that birds have inborn physiological ability to sing,
however they need to hear a tutor (usually a father) – to learn and fully
develop a specific complex singing pattern. Every bird sings its own unique
song with some similarities learned from males of the same species. Once a
song is considered to be perfect – remains fixed for life.

10. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
 What is its survival value?
How the behaviour affects an animal;s chances to survive or to reproduce?
 Example: Bird song
Singing helps male to attract a female, it is a part of mating ritual. So high
quality and complexity of song it will increase its chance to impress
female – to reproduce.

11. Animal behaviour
Four categories of question (N. Tinbergen 1963)
 How did the behaviour evolve? Why?
 Example: Bird song
No all birds have appropriate physiological predisposition to sing,
however most of them can make specific vocal sounds - to attract
females, defend territory, some sounds serve as alarms or are keeping
flock in contact

12. Animal behaviour
 behaviour – can be defined as all the actions how animal
interacts with other living organisms and the environment
 According to ist origin, behaviour can be divided into two types:
 1. innate behaviour – is programmed type of behaviour fixed in
genes, is inheritable passing from generation to generation through
genes. Cannot be modified by experience
 2. learned behaviour- comes from experience and is not present at
birth – an animal has to learn it through trial and error, is not
inheritable

13. Innate animal behaviour
 Genetically programmed – inherited from parents
 It;s performance has always the same stereotyped
pattern, cannot be changed or modified by
experience
 Is predictable and conserved over generations
 Has crucial role for animal survival – mainly in
species that do not get guidance from their parents
 When animals kept in isolated conditions – its
performance is similar to that observed in free-
living animals, isolation does not affects its
presence
Example: migration of salmon, migration of turtle

14. Innate animal behaviour
complex innate behaviour
 Use of environmental cues (or internal clock)
to carry out behaviour
 Hibernation – usually (but not always)
associated with low external temperatures to
conserve energy during a period when food is
unavailable- (bear, bat, rodents, hedgehog )
 Aestivation – animals enter aestivation in
reponse to hot temperatures - to avoid
dryness and desiccation (land snails, insect -
ladybug, frogs, crocodiles..)
 Migration – regular movement of animals
from one location to another – usually in
seasonal pattern
 Kinesis, taxis

15. Innate animal behaviour
Instinct
 Instinct – inherent inclination of
animal towards specific
behaviour
 behaviour is presented without
being based on previous
experience
Example: A )newly hatched sea trutles migrate toward the
sea without previous experience
B) Informative dancing of honeybees

16. Innate animal behaviour
Fixed action pattern
 Fixed action pattern - the simplest type of behaviour – in
which a particular stimulus - or „releaser“ will elicit almost
invariable behavioural response
 It is highly conserved behavioural sequence of movements
– called to be „hard wired“, is almost invariate within
species
 A key stimulus – releaser is often a very simple
environmental cue
 The pattern will go to completion even if the stimulus
is removed
 Genetic programming provides its perfect and correct
performing without practise
Example of an innate behaviour – building of a spider web

17. Innate animal behaviour
Fixed action pattern
Example: Graylag goose and misplaced
egg
1. When a goose notices a displaced
egg, it will roll it back to the nest
with its beak (stimulus – misplaced
egg)
2. If the egg is taken away (stimulus
removed), the goose will continue
rolling an imaginary egg to the
nest to complete behavioural
pattern
If an egg is replaced with a similar
object – a light bulb or a ball – it will
also acts as a releaser (as seen on
youtube video file)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PcteKRA3zs

18. Learned Animal behaviour
 Learned behaviour is not inherited
 Is gained through life by „trial – error learning“
 Highly variable, animals of the same population may react
differently
 Usually does not have crucial role for animal survival but
provides a strong advantage
 When animals kept in isolated conditions, behavioural response
does not develop or is different from free living counterparts
 Includes habituation, imprinting, conditioning, insight

19. Learned animal behaviour
Non associative learning
 Habituation
 The simplest form of learning in which an organism decreases response
after repeated irrelevant presentations (not paired with reward or
punishment)
 organism learns to stop responding to stimulus which is no longer
biologically relevant
 very important in animal world
 Example:
A caged hamster becomes frightened when a person taps on its cage; however,
when it realizes that the taps pose no danger, it becomes used to hearing them
and stops responding

20. Learned animal behaviour
Imprinting
 Imprinting is the process by which an animal baby
establishes a biological bonds to its parents (filial
imprinting) – well known in nidifugous birds – when mother
followed by group of young ones (fig. 1)
 Occures only at a particular age period (usually lasts only a
few hours, days or weeks – depending on animal species)
 For example in goose the critical period lasts between 13-
16 hours after hatching
 Goose at this period imprint (bond) to first relevant suitable
moving stimulus – usually it is mother goose, however in
experimental conditions it can also be an inanimate object
 Deeply studied and made famous by an austrian zoologist
Konrad Lorenz – with his experiment where he let imprint
young geese to his wading boots and everywhere he went,
he was followed by them
Fig. 2. K.
Lorenz
followed by
group of
geese –
become
imprinted on
his boots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UIU9XH-mUI
1.
2.

21. Animal behaviour
Associative learning - conditioning
 Classical conditioning
 Occurs when we pair something what is neutral (neutral stimulus -
brings no reaction – sound, picture, phrase, ) with something what
has natural reaction (salivation, eye blink, )
 Widely studied by I.P. Pavlov on dogs and children
Example:
A dog is starts to salivate when seeing a meat
A dog starts to salivate when hearing a bell

22. Animal behaviour
Associative learning - conditioning
Classical conditioning by I.P. Pavlov
A neutral event, such as ringing a bell
(a neutral stimulus, NS) could be associated
with another event that followed - in this case,
being fed (known as the unconditioned
stimulus, UCS). This association could be
created through repeating the neutral
stimulus along with the unconditioned
stimulus, which would become a conditioned
stimulus, leading to a conditioned response:
salivation.

23. Learned BEHAVIOUR
Associative learning - CONDITIONING
 Picture of a rat in operant chamber
Operant conditioning experiment – F.B.
Skinner
First you place a hungry rat into the operant
chamber – Skinner box. The box contains a
lever on the side and as the rat moves about
the box it will accidentally knocks the lever.
Immediately it do so a food pellet will drop
into a container next to the lever – and is
eaten by the rat. The rat quickly learnes to go
straight to the lever after a few times of being
put in the box (rat is positively reinforced).
The consequence of receiving food if it
presses the lever ensures that the rat would
repeat the action again and again.......
Reinforcement – behaviour that is more likely to occur in the future
Punishment – behaviour that is less likely to occur i the future
Extinction – particular behaviour does not receive any response - therefore it extincts

24. Learned animal behaviour
Insight
First described by Wolfgang Kohler
(1945), who become famous for his
insight experiments on chimpanzees
Insight is a very specific form of
learning – where the correct
solution suddently occurs – animals
suddently realize how to solve a
task, without previous step-by step
working toward correct solution.

25. Complex behaviour
partially innate/partially learned ?
 Many behaviours are programmed in genes
to develop, however their full representation
depends on learning abilities and experience
of an individual
Example:
Bird singing
birds of order passeriformes are born with
predisposition to sing, however its final song is a
composition of learned from father (or other
members of the same genus) and from individual
singing pattern
Language acquisition in humans
 Babies are preprogrammed for language
learning, but which language they learn
depends on what they're exposed to during
their plastic learning period

26. Conclusions:
 Animals display various kinds of behaviour types, almost all aspects
of life are fulfilled with specific behavioural responses
 Behaviour can be divided into two types: innate and learned
behaviour
 Innate behaviour – is programmed type of behaviour fixed in
genes, is inheritable passing from generation to generation through
genes. Cannot be modified by experience
 Learned behaviour- comes from experience and is not present at
birth – an animal has to learn it through trial and error, is not
inheritable

27. references
 https://www.themarysue.com/ducklings-imprint-on-corgi/
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vocalization
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern
 http://www.appsychology.com/Book/behaviour/insight_learning.htm
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning