This is a short presentation about the Animal learning. Animal behavior and the types of learning has been explained in this presentation.

1. Learning Behavior in Animals
Tahaa Saeed

2. Animal Learning
• Behavior that develops through experience
• The need to exploit past experience being obviously
extremely important for survival
• the modification of behavior in response to specific
experiences
• Change in the environment
• Not genetic (Not coded in DNA)

4. Characteristics
• Often long lasting change
• Not inherited (not passed down to next generation)
• Some information or knowledge is acquired and is then used to alter the individual’s
actions and responses
• Learning as an adaptive behavior allows individuals to adapt to specific environment
challenges
• Fish, Mammals and birds can learn more than Invertebrate animals
• Mammals can learn the most.
• Human baby instinctive at start learned afterwards throughout
the life
• Not intrinsic
• It is adaptable (Can be changed to suit the conditions)
• It is progressive (can be refined through practice)

5. An Alone Animal
• Learned behavior is due to the Observations
and Experiences
• So an animal which isolated or living might not
be as good as showing the learned behaviour
as others

7. Conditions
• Animals learn a behavior only if they have
gained benefit from the behavior
• Instincts can be modified by learning
• Depends on environment
• It can’t be learnt by single spontaneous
accident

8. Types of Animal Behavior
• Habituation
• Imprinting
• Trial And Error
• Conditioning

9. Habituation
• Habituation can be defined in behavioral
terms as a decline in responding to a
repeatedly presented stimulus.
• The decreased flight or fight response

11. Examples
• Prairie dogs typically sound an alarm call when threatened
by a predator. At first, they will give this alarm call in
response to hearing human steps, which indicate the
presence of a large and potentially hungry animal.
• the prairie dogs gradually become habituated to the sound
of human footsteps, as they repeatedly experience the
sound without anything bad happening. Eventually, they
stop giving the alarm call in response to footsteps

13. The Scarecrows
• Crows and other birds get used to the
scarecrows in a day or two that’s why they are
continuously changed to get the results

15. Imprinting
• A type of learning in which an animal forms a
social attachment to another organism within
specific time period after birth or hatching
• Geese and other small birds

16. Example
• When ducklings hatch, they imprint on the first
adult animal they see, typically their mother.
• Once a duckling has imprinted on its mother, the
sight of the mother acts as a cue to trigger a suite
of survival-promoting behaviors, such as
following the mother around and imitating her.

18. Trial and Error
• Behavior that is modified by experience is
called trial and error
• Both invertebrates and vertebrates learn by
trial and error
• Motivation is something inside an animal that
causes an animal to act and take trys

19. Examples
• Young chicks first start to peck for food
Peck at different things and for many times
until they learn to peck only the grains

21. Rat and Maze Experiment

22. Conditioning
• In conditioning, the behavior is modified so
that a response previously associated with
one stimulus becomes associated with
another

23. Examples

25. Human baby
• When a baby touches a furry animal, struck
hard on a metal object to frighten him
• Keep doing it
• After some trials the baby will start to be
frightened even by the furry animal
without the striking sound

26. References
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq4ahmk4_HE
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
• https://www.britannica.com/science/animal-
learning/Types-of-learning#ref62000
• https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/behavi
oral-biology/animal-behavior/a/learned-behaviors
• Merrill Life Science, Macmillan and McGraw-Hill