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An avoidance response is a behavior based on the concept that animals will avoid performing behaviors that result in an aversive outcome. This can involve learning through operant conditioning when it is used as a training technique.
Displacement activities occur when an animal or human experiences high motivation for two or more conflicting behaviours: the resulting displacement activity is usually unrelated to the competing motivations. Birds, for example, may peck at grass when uncertain whether to attack or flee from an opponent; similarly, a human may scratch their ...
The latter include abiotic and biotic factors. Abiotic factors such as temperature or light conditions have dramatic effects on animals, especially if they are ectothermic or nocturnal. Biotic factors include members of the same species (e.g. sexual behavior), predators (fight or flight), or parasites and diseases. [12]
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
"Fixed action pattern" is an ethological term describing an instinctive behavioral sequence that is highly stereotyped and species-characteristic. [1] Fixed action patterns are said to be produced by the innate releasing mechanism, a "hard-wired" neural network, in response to a sign/key stimulus or releaser.
The tabulated schema is used as the central organizing device in many animal behaviour, ethology, behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology textbooks (e.g., Alcock, 2001). One advantage of this organizational system, what might be called the "periodic table of life sciences," is that it highlights gaps in knowledge, analogous to the role ...
To determine the optimum time spent on a behavior, one can make a graph showing how benefits and costs change with behavior. Optimality is defined as the point where the difference between benefits and costs for a behavior is maximized, which can be done by graphing the benefits and costs on the y-axis and a measure of the behavior on the x-axis.
Such antipredator behavior inevitably results in aggregations. The theory was proposed by W. D. Hamilton in 1971 to explain the gregarious behavior of a variety of animals. [ 1 ] It contrasted the popular hypothesis that evolution of such social behavior was based on mutual benefits to the population .