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A well known example of unintentional opportunity providing is the transmission of feeding behavior in black rats (Rattus rattus). One pilot study determined that black rats living in the forests of Palestine preferentially fed on pine cones instead of other fresh fruits and vegetation nearby.
Cultural transmission is hypothesized to be a critical process for maintaining behavioral characteristics in both humans and nonhuman animals over time, and its existence relies on innovation, imitation, and communication to create and propagate various aspects of animal behavior seen today. [3] [4]
Most behaviors which are both fixed action patterns and occur in more complex animals, are usually essential to the animal's fitness, or in which speed (i.e. an absence of learning) is a factor. [6] For instance, the greylag goose's egg-retrieval behavior is so essential to the survival of its chicks that the fitness of the parent bird is ...
The mind and behavior of non-human animals has captivated the human imagination for centuries. Many writers, such as Descartes, have speculated about the presence or absence of the animal mind. [7] These speculations led to many observations of animal behavior before modern science and testing were available.
Classical conditioning occurs when a conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US). Usually, the conditioned stimulus is a neutral stimulus (e.g., the sound of a tuning fork), the unconditioned stimulus is biologically potent (e.g., the taste of food) and the unconditioned response (UR) to the unconditioned stimulus is an unlearned reflex response (e.g., salivation).
The hundredth monkey effect is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea. The behavior was said to propagate even to groups that are physically separated and ...
In latent learning, one changes behavior only when there is sufficient motivation later than when they subconsciously retained the information. [1] Latent learning is when the observation of something, rather than experiencing something directly, can affect later behavior. Observational learning can be many things. A human observes a behavior ...
In evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes an effect of learned behaviour on evolution. James Mark Baldwin and others suggested that an organism's ability to learn new behaviours (e.g. to acclimatise to a new stressor) will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through ...