Ethology and Animal Behavior

• Ethology is a branch of zoology focused on the study of non-human animal behavior
• Animal behavior includes the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems, or artificial entities in some environment
• Domains of ethology consist of development, ecology, evolution and physiology, and behavior occurs at the intersection of all four domains
• Early study of animal behavior was grounded in practical needs such as food, rituals, and transportation
• Animals are kept as pets, used for entertainment, work, raised for food/clothing, and hunting
• Anthropomorphism is the assumption that animals think like humans
• A deeper understanding of animal behavior requires thinking of them as individual organisms
• Studying animal behavior has implications for human society, the environment, genetics, social and emotional development, language development, and biological rhythms
• Animal behavior is linked to neurobiology, environmental conservation, resource management, animal welfare, and science education

History of Ethology

• Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1939) was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his experiments with dogs and the discovery of classical conditioning
• Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1950s) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher who developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and studied operant behaviors
• Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1970s) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology
  • He studied instinctive behavior, imprinting, inherited behaviors, and the genetic basis of behavior in animals
  • Species-specific behavior develops without an animal experiencing stimuli or practice
  • Behavior is a result of nature
• Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (1970s) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist known for his discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals
• The scientific study of animals has 4 parts: causation, development, evolution, and function
• Karl Ritter von Frisch (1970s) was a German-Austrian ethologist who studied honeybee waggle dance
• The mechanism that produces a behavior is internal, involving nervous, hormonal, and physiological processes
• Causation is linked to the mechanism, and ontology involves genetic and environmental components
• Behavior develops through metamorphosis or learning from a young age
• The study of behavior includes its origin from a distant time and how it evolved from an ancestral state

Survival Value

• Survival value (utility) of a behavior is determined by its usefulness in terms of fitness, survival, and reproduction

Domestic Animals

• A domestic animal is kept by humans as a food source or pet and has usually gone through selective breeding

Training Animals

• Training animals involves learning, motivation, and socialization
• Learning theory involves rules set down by psychologists and behaviorists that used clinically controlled stimuli
• A stimulus is any detectable change in an animal's environment, while a response is any behavior or physiological event
• Learning/conditioning is any relatively permanent change in the probability of a response occurring as a result of experience
• Learning is involved in the perfection and shaping of most behavior patterns and manifests itself by adaptive change
• The four P's of proper training of animals are practice, persistence, patience, and praise

Associative Learning

• Associative learning occurs when animals make links between stimuli and responses or cues and outcomes
• Classical conditioning pairs a biologically potent stimulus with a neutral stimulus by association and Dog salivation with the sound of the bell is a perfect example
• Operant conditioning is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition or removal of reward or aversive stimuli
  • It involves voluntary activity that brings about a reward
  • There must be a contingency/ special link between a behavior and a food reward
• Dog in harness is presented with meat powder (S1) which is an unconditioned stimulus, and simultaneously presented with another stimulus (S2), the conditioned stimulus
• The presentation of S2 over time resulted in salivation even without S1
• The relationship between the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and unconditioned response (UCR) and the conditioned stimulus (CS) and conditioned response (CR) is key to understanding learned behavior
• Conditioning is quantified by the number of reinforcements needed, the percent of correct responses, the amplitude of conditioned reflex, and the latency of response
• Extinction is the loss of response, but generalization occurs when another similar stimulus provokes the response, and inhibition is extinction to one stimulus
• Discrimination between similar stimuli may be brought about by selectively reinforcing only one stimulus among trials

Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning involves strengthening an active (operant) response by presenting a reinforcing stimulus if, and only if, the response occurs
• It consists of presenting or omitting some reward or punishment when the animal makes a specific response
• Contiguity, the closeness in time between the performance of the response and the reward, is crucial, as a lapse of several seconds may impede learning in most cases
• Operant conditioning increases controllability of the environment, with contiguity, the closeness in time between the performance of the response and the reward, being very important

Explore ethology, the study of animal behavior, focusing on the nervous system's role and the core elements defining behavior. Understand how studying animals aids conservation and bridges the gap between internal systems and external environments. Discover the impact of animal behavior studies on science education and the practical applications of understanding honeybee behavior.