8.6 Learning and Memory

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Species with short life cycles and lack of parental care rely more on innate behaviour.

- No time to trial and error

- eg: invertebrates.

Innate behaviour in important for young mammals, before they have learned from trial and error.

Habituation:

Occurs when a stimulus is repeated many times and nothing happens - there is no 'punishment' nor 'reward.

The animal learns to simply ignore the stimulus and make no response.

Conditioned reflexes:

the result of animals learning to associates new stimulus with unconditioned reflexes.

Trial and error learning:

occurs when a piece of trial behaviour is either rewarded or punished.

Imprinting:

Simple and specialised sort of learning which only occurs in very young animals.

At one receptive stage the young animal identifies with another organism (usually a parent.) it will then follow this object and relate to other similar objects throughout its life.

Exploratory latent learning:

when an animal explores new surroundings and learns them with any immediate reward or punishment.

Insight learning:

-Based on thought and reasoning

-Mainly seen in mammals, particularly primate, and is regarded as the highest sort of learning.

- Once a problem has been solved the solution is then remembered.

Habituation:

Water is sprayed onto the sea slug's siphon.

Impulses pass along a sensory neurone from the siphon.

The sensory neurone synapses with a motor neurone that connects to the gill muscle.

Impulses pass along the motor neurone.

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