214 ❯ STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
This chapter introduces you to some of the basic terms and concepts used in behavioral
ecology and ethology.Types of Animal Learning
Associative learningis the process by which animals take one stimulus and associate it with
another. Ivan Pavlov demonstrated classical conditioning,a type of associative learning,
with dogs. As will come to be a pattern in this chapter, some poor animals were tampered
with to help us understand an important biological principle. Pavlov taught dogs to antic-
ipate the arrival of food with the sound of a bell. He hooked up these dogs to machines that
measured salivation. He began the experiments by ringing a bell just moments before giving
food to the dogs. Soon after this experiment began, the dogs were salivating at the sound
of the bell before food was even brought into the room. They were conditioned to associ-
ate the noise of the bell with the impending arrival of food; one stimulus was substituted
for another to evoke the same response.
Afixed-action pattern(FAP) is an innate, preprogrammed response to a stimulus.
Once this action has begun, it will not stop until it has run its course. For example, male
stickleback fish are programmed to attack any red-bellied fish that come into their territory.
Males do not attack fish lacking this red coloration; it is specifically the color that stimu-
lates aggressiveness. If fake fish with red bottoms are placed in water containing these stick-
leback fish, there’s bound to be a fight! But if fake fish lacking a red bottom are dropped
in, all is peaceful.
Habituationis the loss of responsiveness to unimportant stimuli. For example, as
one of us started working on this book, he had just purchased a new fish tank for his office
and was struck by how audible the sound of the tank’s filter was. As he sits here typing
tonight about two months later, he does not even hear the filter unless he thinksabout it;
he has become habituated to the noise. There are many examples of habituation in ethol-
ogy. One classic example involves little ducklings that run for cover whenever birdlike
objects fly overhead. If one were to torture these poor baby ducks and throw bird-shaped
objects over their heads, in thebeginning they would head for cover each time one flew past
them, but over time as they learned that the fake birds did not represent any real danger,
they would habituate to the mean trick and eventually not react at all. One side note is that
ethologists who study wild animals usually have to habituate their study subjects to their
presence before recording any behavioral data.
Imprintingis an innate behavior that is learned during a critical period early in life.
For example, when geese are born, they imprint on motion that moves away from them,
and they follow it around accepting it as their mother. This motion can be the baby’s actual
mother goose, it can be a human, or it can be an object. Once this imprint is made, it is
irreversible. If given an essay about behavioral ecology, and imprinting in particular, the
work of Konrad Lorenz would be a nice addition to your response. He was a scientist who
became the “mother” to a group of young geese. He made sure that he was around the baby
geese as they hatched and spent the critical period with them creating that mother–baby
goose bond. These geese proceeded to follow him around everywhere and didn’t recognize
their real mother as their own.
Insight learningis the ability to do something right the first time with no prior expe-
rience. It requires reasoning ability—the skill to look at a problem and come up with an
appropriate solution.
Observational learningis the ability of an organism to learn how to do something by
watching another individual do it first, even if they have never attempted it themselves.KEY IDEA