Habituation and Innate Behaviour Patterns

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Habituation and Innate Behaviour Patterns

• Psychology 3306

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Innate behaviour

• Why talk about this in learning?
• Well, learning often involves innate behaviour
• Many of the rules are similar
• Gives some perspective, i.e., not all behaviour
  is learned

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Thermoregulation
Set Point
Effectors
Controlled Variable
Gain Vasoconstriction Shivering
Loss Dilation Sweating panting
Feedback
Feedback mechanisms can be or or both
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Reflexes

• Stereotypic in response to a stimulus
• Sensory -gt inter -gt motor neurons
• Some quite complex behaviour can come of such
  simple connections and in relatively simple
  animals

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In a Moths Ear.

• Moth Ear basically has two neurons A1 and A2
• They are not frequency sensitive, but do not
  respond to low frequencies

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Those would be some tiny Q tips..
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Do Moths Have Ear Wax?

• A1 is responsive to intensity
• More firing with closer bat
• A2 only fires with very loud sounds
• A2 fires, bat must be very close

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Moths and Bats, Charts and Graphs

• A1 on the left fires, that wing beats faster
• Moths course corrects to 180 degrees from bat
• So very and totally cool
• A2, go crazy
• 2 neuron ear can encode where a predator in in 3
  dimensional space!!!

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Examples

• Its not just me that thinks this is way cool

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Behavioural Sequences

• Fixed action patterns
• Everyone does it
• Not prior learning
• Rigid sequence

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Examples

• Dust bathing in Burmese Red Junglefowl
• Ancestor of our KFC
• Function of the behaviour is to clean out oil
  from the feathers and to get rid of parasites.
• Some birds bathe in water, others in dust

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Animal starts out by fluffing up some dust
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Next is a bill scratch, which gets the dust up
onto the neck
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Lots of scratching goes on to work up a bit of a
cloud really
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Dustbathing

• This is actually pretty complex beahaviour
• Vestergaard, Hogan and Krujt (1990) found that
  junglefowl dont need dust!
• Hogan and Van Boxel (1993) found that dustbathing
  was already rhythmic at 14 days post hatch

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Etholodgy is cool

• Reaction chains are sequences of FAPs
• You can tell it is a reaction chain and not an
  FAP if the animal can stop the behaviour
• We have reduced all of ethology down to a few
  power point slides.

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Habituation

• Decrease in the strength of a response after
  repeated presentation of a discreet stimulus
• Getting used to it, sort of
• NOT sensory adaptation or simply fatigue
• Stimulus specific
• Orienting response
• Startle response

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The rules

• Thompson and Spencer (1966)
• Gradual with time
• Withhold stimulus and response will reoccur
• Savings
• Intensity
• Overlearning
• Stimulus generalization

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Pokin aplysisa

• Kendel et al
• Gill withdrawal
• Seonsory -gt motor pretty much
• Less transmitter released into synapses!
• Decrease in Ca current
• Similar results in cats
• Because of its generality, habituation is often
  thought of as the universal learning paradigm