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Despite the fact that his major research focus involved instinct and purpose, he was open to the idea of researching innate abilities in the rats. Tolman's study was the first experiment to examine the genetic basis of maze learning by breeding distinct lineages of rats selected for their maze performance.
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations. In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.
Self-preservation is essentially the process of an organism preventing itself from being harmed or killed and is considered a basic instinct in most organisms. [6] Most call it a "survival instinct". Self-preservation is thought to be tied to an organism's reproductive fitness and can be more or less present according to perceived reproduction ...
The great apes (Hominidae) show some cognitive and empathic abilities. Chimpanzees can make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have mildly complex hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some ...
A monkey drinking Frooti from a juice box using its hands. 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]
To discover how rats habituate to change, Small made it so the door to the food in the box did not spring open. The rats would have to crawl under the door to get to the food. The rat Small deemed to be the most intelligent was able to gradually figure out the way to get the food quicker with less fear, showing evidence of habituation.
The ethological concept of species-typical behavior is based on the premise that certain behavioral similarities are shared by almost all members of a species. [1] Some of these behaviors are unique to certain species, but to be 'species-typical' they do not have to be unique, they simply have to be characteristic of that species.