Hi. It's Mr. Andersen and in this podcast I'm going to talk about animal
behavior. If you study animal behavior you're called an ethologist. And so that's ethology
which is the study of animal behavior. But know this. When you study animal behavior
there's a wide continuum of behaviors. And it's going to move all the way from innate
behaviors. So this turtle, sea turtle is born and it's going to immediately head out to
sea. And so these are thing that you have from day one. It's a continuum all the way
up to complex learned behavior, like this chimpanzee. You can see he's thinking something
pretty profound I would imagine. And so let's work our way from the innate all the way up
to the learned behavior. The first thing that you should know is that an instinct is basically
anything that you have from day one. And so if you ever take you're finger and put it
up next to a baby's hand, the baby will grab on to that. Which you might think that's really
cute. But it you put it next to their foot, they'll grab on to you as well with their
toes. And so this is a grasping reflex that all babies have from day one. And so that's
genetically programmed into them. And you can think about it just from an evolutionary
perspective. Babies who weren't able to hold on mom, over evolutionary history, ended up
hitting the ground and not making it very far. And so an example of this in the animal
kingdom, we could have the hognose snake. So the hognose snake basically when you come
up and threaten it, it will spit at you and try to intimidate you. But it doesn't have
poison. And so basically if you get too close and mess with it too much, it'll turn upside
down. It's head will get thrown back. It's tongue comes out and it starts to ooze like
the smell of dead decaying flesh. Okay. So that's cool. But they have it from day one.
In other words, once a hognose snake is born, the minute they hatch out of the egg, they
have this behavior. So it's clearly an instinct. Next we have what are called fixed action
patterns. Fixed action patterns, it's basically when you have a stimuli. It's a series of
actions you're going to take to completion. And so it's easier to understand if I give
you an example. So this is a greylag goose. Basically they'll sit on their eggs and incubate
their eggs. But if you ever take one of their eggs out and put it next to the nest, they'll
basically take their beak and they're going to pull that back into the nest. And so they
can sit on it. And you might think that's a really smart goose. However, if you take
like a billiard ball, something that you play pool with and put it next to their nest, they're
going to pull that in. Or a light bulb. They'll pull that in and sit on it. And you might
think that's a stupid goose. But if you think about it, through their history they never
really need to evolve a better way to discriminate between eggs. And so that works well. And
they're probably wasn't back in the day a scientist replacing all their eggs with light
bulbs. And so they didn't need to evolve any kind of a better method. Now you might think,
we don't do that. Humans don't show fixed action patterns. But you do. If somebody ever
sees you and you recognize somebody but you weren't looking for them, you'll go like this
to them. So you'll be like, hey, how's it going? And when you do that what you're doing
is you're lifting your head up, your eyebrows are going to come up. And you do what's called
an eyebrow flash. And you don't even know that you're doing it. But once you see somebody
do it to you, then you have to do it back to them. Try this out. I do this on students
all the time. It's really fun. Next we have what's called imprinting. Imprinting is basically
not learned behavior but it's going to be something that happens during what's called
a critical period in your lifetime. And so in geese, basically they'll imprint on their
mother. And they'll follow her around until they become older. And so this guy, Konrad
Lorenz, basically realized that if he could take the mother out and he could take her
place during this critical period of time, then they would follow him. So no matter where
he would walk, they would just follow him thinking that he's mom. Salmon will do the
same thing. So they imprint on the chemical smell in creeks that they're in. And so as
they go out to the ocean and come back again they can find it. But it has to occur during
this critical period of time. Next as we move our way up is what's called associative learning.
You're probably familiar with Pavlov and Pavlov's dogs. Basically what happens is you start
to associate two stimuli or one stimuli with some effect. And so for example he would work
with dogs where he would ring the bell then he would give them some meat powder. And then
he would measure, you can see he's measuring dog spit right here. And so he'd basically
ring the bell, give them meat powder. Ring the bell, give them meat powder. And so they
started to associate ringing the bell with eating. And so pretty soon he could just ring
the bell and then they would start to salivate. And so around here we have bears in the spring
that come out. And basically what they'll do is raid all the bird feeders. And so they're
associating that food with that location. And so years later they come back to that
same place. If you don't want them to do that, you have to remove the stimuli. You have to
remove the bird feeder. Next we have what's called trial and error learning. Trial and
error learning, the person who's most associate with this is B.F. Skinner. And he developed
something called the Skinner box. So this is kind of an example of that. You put a rat
in here. Maybe some lights and a little lever. And so basically you can teach them. So let's
say when the green light comes on, the rat, if he happens to just touch the lever, then
food comes out. And so basically you can teach them really complex behavior using this trial
and error. It's kind of how we train dogs, same way. One of my favorite stories of this
is, I think his name is Josh Klein, developed what's called a crow vending machine. If you
just put crow vending machine into YouTube you'll find it. What he did is he used trial
and error learning to basically build a vending machine. He'd put quarters around it and then
teach the crows that if the put the quarters inside a slot then food would come out. And
so basically you train them through a series of steps and then let them go. And they fly
around town. Find coins. Bring them back. And then he got the money and then they would
get the food. So we call this operate conditioning, when you're teaching them to do that through
trial and error. Next as we move up is habituation. Habituation is when you get the same stimuli
over and over and over again. And you eventually learn to ignore it. And so this is a prairie
dog. And when a hawk comes by or a snake, they'll basically make this scream. And so
all the other prairie dogs will head under ground. And so what happens with humans is
if you go around prairie dogs they'll do the same thing. But if you don't harm them, and
you keep going around prairie dogs, eventually they'll habituate to that. And they'll ignore
it. And they won't make those calls. Likewise if we have a sea anemone here and you put
shrimp for example on a sea anemone tentacle, they'll eat it. And you put shrimp and they'll
eat it. But you put a chuck of plastic there, they'll eat it. And you put plastic there
and they'll eat it. And you put plastic there and then they'll just ignore it. So they're
not getting that food hit and so eventually they'll habituate to the presence of that
plastic. And you can see evolutionarily why this is important. You don't want to always
have the same response to every stimuli. Next we move up to what's called observational
learning. Observational learning is watching another organism. And you can see how we're
headed up that continuum towards learned behavior. Observational learning is simply watching
another organism and mimicking that. And so one of my favorite organisms is the octopus.
And basically when you put octopus in an aquarium and you give them a problem, in this case
there's a bottle with a lid on the top. And they have to open up that lid and then get
to the food inside it. About half the octopi will be able to do that, half won't be able
to solve the problem. But if you put a octopi in an adjacent tank it will watch this one
and it will learn how to do that. Right here we have a researcher sticking his tongue out.
And then a little makak monkey is going to stick his tongue out as well. And so a really
cool area of research is in what is called mirror neurons. And so mirror neurons, it
sounds a lot like a motor neuron, but a motor neuron allows me to do something like touch
myself right here on the head. But a mirror neuron is different. And so if you watch me
take my finger and touch myself right there on the head, watch me do that. As I do that,
a certain percentage in you of the neurons that allow me to touch my head right here,
a certain number of those neurons, I remember it being something like 10%, are also firing
in you. And so by you watching me, you're actually learning how to do it by practicing
those neurons. And we find this in mammals. And I think it's a pretty cool area of research.
And then the last thing I wanted to finish with is insight. We tend not to see insight
lower down this continuum. But let me give you an example. Let me give you a problem.
This is called the candle problem. And so basically think of it this way. You're given
matches, tacks and a candle. And I want you to stick the candle to a wall and then light
it. And so if I were to give you these objects and put you in a room, you'll eventually try
a number of things. You might try to heat the candle up on the side and stick it to
the wall. Trust me it won't work. You could stick tacks in and try to balance it on there.
It's also not going to work. You could heat the tacks. Still nothing. And so basically
you would eventually come up, using insight, with something like this. Hopefully. And so
you would have to dump out the tacks and use the tacks as a candle holder. And so it takes
awhile for you to solve this. And some organisms would never be able to do that because they
don't have what's called insight. But chimpanzee's do. If I were to put a chimpanzee in a room.
Put a banana up on the ceiling. Give a bunch of boxes in here where the chimpanzee couldn't
reach. And just give him or her time, basically he'd be able to solve this problem by stacking
the boxes up and getting the banana. And so this is insight. And we don't tend to see
insight in really lower level organisms that don't have highly developed brains. But crows
for example can solve really complex problems. Chimps and primates can solve problems. Dolphins,
small tooth whales can solve that. And so what we find as far as intelligence goes is
that you don't need to be intelligent until you really start living socially. And once
you start living socially, you have to look out for yourself. But you also have to look
out for everybody that's around you. And so that's where we get high level intelligence
showing up. But we're just smart enough to get by. And hopefully you're a little smarter
now. So I hope that's helpful.