Steven Crane Compiled Section Handouts. Human Behavioral Biology 2012

Substitution:

Replication:

Superstimulation:

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  Often a RS triggers a FAP which is in turn a RS for a subsequent FAP in the first individual, and so on, especially around courting and sex.
  
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  Also RS come in many modalities. Like what?
  

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  Auditory RS: roaring stags cause ovulation. Humans and others have higher-pitched female vocalization around ovulation.
  
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  Visual RS: turkeys and the experiments teasing apart what triggers their mating behavior. And baby-ness RS (big eyes, shortened muzzle, round big forehead).
  
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  Olfactory: hamsters and other rodents. And humans (the fear-sweat activates amygdala, and the sad-tears
  

dampen sexual arousal examples).

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  Electrical: electric fish with electric FAPs
  
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  Vibration: spiders with their webs, termites in the wood, and elephants with their feet
  

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  Special case of Harlow's rhesus monkeys
  

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  Give them two "mother figures"
  
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    Cold wire mom gives milk
    
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    Cloth mother is warm and comfortable
    
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  Classical learning (from behaviorists) would predict the milk rewards would cause attachment. Prediction was violated because the infants preferred the warm cloth mom all the time except when feeding.
  
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    So attachment FAPs from the infants were due to comfort RS instead of food RS.
    

What is the internal biology that produced the behavior? This is neuroethology.

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  Instead of the behaviorists who treat the brain as a black, unobservable box, ethologists wanted to know what was going on once the tools were available.
  
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  They called the steps between an RS and a FAP, the innate releasing mechanisms. Now they call the study of these mechanisms, neuroethology because it's diving in to the neural level.
  
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  What have they found? 3 examples
  

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  1: How does the lordosis reflex work?
  

  • It's a FAP of exposing female hamster genitals in response to flank pressure and is mediated by estrogen (she only does it while ovulating).

  • Estrogen causes the entire pathway of the FAP to work (tactile receptors feed the brain, brain computes the signal, sends signals to the muscles, etc.)

• 2: Subliminal presentation of fearful faces is an RS for complex physiological fear response in humans (resulting in amygdala activation).

• 3: Birds and their mating behavior can have accelerated courtship times in response to climatic changes (mediated by reproductive and stress hormones which they're studying in wild birds).

How does learning play a role? How did ethology provide a backlash to behaviorism in the realm of learning?

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  Back to behaviorists. What’s their view of traditional learning?
  

• Rewards lead to more of a behavior

• Punishments lead to less of a behavior

• Takes many repetitions to do classical conditioning

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  Ethologists like learning in contexts that defy behaviorism
  

• Imprinting like with baby geese. Major learning occurs without rewards or punishments. This is one-trial learning happening within a critical window for imprinting. Defies all manner of behaviorism.

• Prepared learning like with the Sauce Bernaise syndrome. You are prepared to learn associations between food and belly aches than between sound and belly aches, even if the sound stimulus is much closer to the belly ache experience.

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  We have innate predispositions to certain kind of learning
  

  • Ex: bees with learning smells better than visual stimuli.

  • Ex: humans are easier to condition to fear snakes and spiders.

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    Ex: humans spotting animate over inanimate objects.
    
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  General point: understanding the appropriate context to display a behavior is huge. There's innate behaviors (defying behaviorism) and they're shaped in very non-behaviorist ways.
  

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  Ethologists also like learning in surprising contexts. Like what?
  

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  Mother primates learn how to be better mothers over time. How do we know? Later offspring do better than earlier and mothers with "aunting" experience have better success with their first borns.
  
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  Meerkats teach their kids how to hunt scorpions. Gradual introduction of more elaborate scorpion-hunting techniques.
  
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  We also see culture, transmission of traits down generations in certain groups.
  

Then cognitive ethology

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  Understanding animal thought processes
  
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  Griffin studying animal awareness. How do you test this?
  
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  Studying theory of mind (that others have different minds and know different thinks) in chimps and corvids. How ^{did they test this in chimps?} The transparent or opaque screen and taking food out from under the high-ranking chimp's nose.
  
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  Also evidence of theory of mind:
  

^o Chimps and dogs can tell purposeful vs. accidental behavior

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  Even bees have flexible cognitive strategies. Shown by what? Bee dance signals that there's food where it makes no sense that there's food: in the middle of a lake.
  
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  They have numerosity and as well
  

Example questions

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  Describe the patterns present with vervet monkey alarm calls. What do they teach us about core principles of ethology?
  

^o They are FAPs learned at birth but shaped by experience to be emitted in response to appropriate releasing stimuli. Vervet monkeys also have flexible cognitive strategies and know not to listen to young, inexperienced vervet monkeys.

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  Describe the marital patterns associated with Israeli Kibbutzs. What does this tell us about human kin recognition?
  

^o Children form the same kibbutz don't go on to marry people from within their kibbutz. Shows they think of their kibbutz-mates as pseudo-relatives; their cognitive strategy has been fooled.

Key examples - know the details, their significance, their criticisms. What do they illustrate? Why are they included? (these are all ethology)

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  Nut cracking in squirrels
  
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  Vervet monkey predator alarm calls
  
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  The waggle dance of bees
  
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  Speckled egg shells
  
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  The red dot on beak as a releasing stimulus
  
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  The lordosis reflex and its adaptive value
  
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  Mother primates learning how to mother
  
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  The sauce béarnaise syndrome and one-trial learning
  
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  The dot test in chimps/elephants