Animal Behavior

INTRODUCTION
Animal Behavior, the way different kinds of animals behave, which has fascinated inquiring minds since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle. Particularly intriguing has been the ability of simple creatures to perform complicated tasks—weave a web, build a nest, sing a song, find a home, or capture food—at just the right time with little or no instruction. Such behavior can be viewed from two quite different perspectives, discussed below: Either animals learn everything they do (from “nurture”), or they know what to do instinctively (from “nature”). Neither extreme has proven to be correct.

NURTURE: THE BEHAVIORISTS
Until recently the dominant United States school in behavioral theory has been behaviorism, whose best-known figures are J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Strict behaviorists hold that all behavior, even breathing and the circulation of blood, according to Watson, is learned; they believe that animals are, in effect, born as blank slates upon which chance and experience are to write their messages. Through conditioning, they believe, an animal’s behavior is formed. Behaviorists recognize two sorts of conditioning: classical and operant.
In the late 19th century the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning while studying digestion. He found that dogs automatically salivate at the sight of food—an unconditioned response to an unconditioned stimulus, to use his terminology. If Pavlov always rang a bell when he offered food, the dogs began slowly to associate this irrelevant (conditioned) stimulus with the food. Eventually the sound of the bell alone could elicit salivation. Hence, the dogs had learned to associate a certain cue with food. Behaviorists see salivation as a simple reflex behavior, something like the knee-jerk reflex doctors trigger when they tap a patient’s knee with a hammer.
The other category, operant conditioning, works on the principle of punishment or reward. In operant conditioning a rat, for example, is taught to press a bar for food by first being rewarded for facing the correct end of the cage, next being rewarded only when it stands next to the bar, then only when it touches the bar with its body, and so on, until the behavior is shaped to suit the task. Behaviorists believe that this sort of trial-and-error learning, combined with the associative learning of Pavlov, can serve to link any number of reflexes and simple responses into complex chains that depend on whatever cues nature provides. To an extreme behaviorist, then, animals must learn all the behavioral patterns that they need to know.