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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.
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 novel object recognition (NOR) test is an animal behavior test that is primarily used to assess memory alterations in rodents. It is a simple behavioral test that is based on a rodents innate exploratory behavior. The test is divided into three phases: habituation, training/adaptation and test phase.
Often, the response is an innate behavior. Essentially, the animal learns not to respond to irrelevant stimuli. For example, prairie dogs ( Cynomys ludovicianus ) give alarm calls when predators approach, causing all individuals in the group to quickly scramble down burrows.
Habituation processes are adaptive, allowing animals to adjust their innate behaviors to changes in their natural world. A natural animal instinct, for example, is to protect themselves and their territory from any danger and potential predators. An animal needs to respond quickly to the sudden appearance of a predator.
With animal training it is often questioned if the training and shaping is the cause of a behaviour exhibited by an animal (nurture), or if the behaviour is actually innate to the species (nature). [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instinctive drift centers around the nature of behaviour more so than learning being the sole cause of a behaviour.
Many behaviors that are commonly thought of as spiteful are actually better explained as being selfish, that is benefiting the actor and harming the recipient, and true spiteful behaviors are rare in the animal kingdom. An example of spite is the sterile soldiers of the polyembryonic parasitoid wasp. A female wasp lays a male and a female egg ...
Vacuum activities (or vacuum behaviours) are innate fixed action patterns (FAPs) of animal behaviour that are performed in the absence of a sign stimulus (releaser [broken anchor]) that normally elicit them. [1] This type of abnormal behaviour shows that a key stimulus is not always needed to produce an activity. [2]