11-16-06, More behavior

The fire burned 1200 acres. Study the effects of the fire on the ecosystem. Get your notes out from yesterday. You can study it over the years and find how the ecosystem recovers.

In our continuing discussion beginning with cellular transportation and then to cellular communication, which leads us to how messages are transferred across the nervous system and the relationship between the nervous system and the environment, is what we call behavior. We talked about innate (genetically programmed) behaviors. We talked about the set of innate behaviors that adapt organisms to their particular circumstance. What decides which adaptations are good and which are bad are usually either (1) the organism's survival or (2) the survival of the species. The third and final part is the second type of behavior: learned behavior.

Learned behavior is experienced-based modifications of stimuli response. That is right out of Ragsdale's notes. To have that make sense, learned behaviors are those things that result in the way that you approach a stimulus. You can learn from experiences. Know the ways in which organisms can learn.

Each one of you have a special way of obtaining information and modifying your behavior. You may have been raised in households that were very strict. Ragsdale has three sets of grandchildren. Think about punishment for children and spankings, time out, and so on. What are the right ways to teach children like that? Do they really act out in such ways that merit spankings and beatings? How else can they learn? Know what the learning curve is. What is an individual's learning curve? Relate this back to SuperMemo.

Little boys grow up to be bigger boys that grow up to be men that are bigger boys. There are five types of learned behaviors. The first of those types of learned behaviors is imprinting. Imprinting is the recognition response and attachment of the young to some particular adult or object.

Remember Konrad Lorenz and his geese experiments and so on. There are some innate behaviors that always took place but there were also some behaviors that developed as a result of imprinting on him. In a sheep herd, most sheep-ranchers try to breed the sheep so that all of the lambs are born at the same time. If you time it correctly, there is less chance of the little ones being lost and frozen, and if a yu happens to die during lamb birth another can take care of the young lamb and so on. Anyway, each lamb is imprinted on to each particular yu, and the yu imprints on the lamb, and if the lamb is lost for a significant period of time (wandering off and so on) and obtains another scent, then the yu will reject the born lamb. In order to get another yu to take the orphan lamb, the lamb of the second yu has to have its scent transferred to the orphan, and basically that's the only way that can do it.

Humans imprint just like other animals do. As results of Bosnia, of WW2, studies of orphaned children, those war-orphanages where the overworked workers can only basically give them food for a few moments, and those children that are not imprinted to the human contact, do not develop properly either mentally or physically and they have been following these people for many years. Even as important as feeding them is to pick them up and talk with them and so on. Learn about the orphans of Bosnia and from the wars in the mid `90s. Ah, there are also some children from WW2 and so on.

The second form is learning is called habituation. Know how you learn best. Habituation is the loss of some response due to familiarity with the stimulus. An example of habituation would be Jessica no longer jumping when Ragsdale throws the book down. An easier way to think about this is the cry wolf effect, “wolf!,” they all came, and there was no wolf, and the villagers would come again, and finally when he called wolf for real, they ignored the stimulus and the effect was that the wolf got some lunch.

What have you habituated yourselves to? Educators have spent much time habituating students to the bell system in schools. The toughest thing you have to do is ignore it. Habituation is the opposite of the bells. It's where you ignore the stimulus as opposed to reacting to it in some way. Most teenagers go through some period of constant habituation with their parents, because the parents are telling them to do this, do that, do this, and you stand in front of them and say, “yes, yes, yes, yes,” and so on, and in reality you are planning not to respond to that stimulus.

Repetition is an interesting way for memorization (and these are just my thoughts on animal behavior). It is interesting that memory is related to behavior in some way or another. And figuring out how much repetition is required is an interesting challenge. Maybe the memorization problems that I have had recently with Luna's polyatomic ions quiz can be overcome by associating all of the information to so many other stimulus from before and so on. Anyway, back to the lecture.

The third type of learned behavior is conditioning. There is classical and operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is trial and error learning. One of the things that we need to understand is that learning requires modification by definition. Link that back to Bloom's taxonomy from earlier in the year. Reinforcement is required. Repetition and reinforcement are not the same way. Negative reinforcement is more rapidly habituated than positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is more easily habituated than positive reinforcement. Reinforcement is the manner in which a response is modified and simply it becomes either reward or punishment.

How did you learn to read? You all have the advantage because you are still long enough to remember first grade and learning to read. His grandchildren are reading Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. You have to encourage the children along the way. You don't say, “geeze, that's horrible, try doing better,” teachers gave you stickers, your parents did stuff, and so on.

It is hard to talk about trial and error learning, and about rewards and punishments, and let's see. Trial and error learning is where the natural experience causes you to do something or not. When you look at the head of some bolt, and you will do this eventually, there are the English and metric versions of the bolts, and you will take it out of something (maybe a table leg), and you will try a wrench on top of that bolt and it either fits or it does not, and if you have that inch wrench (10 mm as the case may be), and the next bolt about that size, you're going to go get that 10 millimeter wrench.

Ragsdale used to teach driver's ed too. Understand the mechanics of the car. Driving is trial and error at first. Animals are big trial and error things. Cats and dogs use it all the time. They have natural reinforcements. When you see a cat stalk a bird, that cat has a set of innate behaviors that it is using, but it also learns when to move and when not to and so on based on past experiences.

The next type of learned behavior which is an extension of trial and error is classical conditioning. So now we have to talk about Pavlove. Classical conditioning is behavior produced as a result of reinforcement. That's probably not in the books. The bell system and the reaction of the students is classical conditioning. Anyway, his classical experiment was with dogs and so on. Maybe the experiments began with the communists wanting to brainwash or maybe his experiments extended into the change of the psychological aspects of people because of the Russian communists in the Korean war and so on.

He noticed that the dog salivated every time the dog was fed. He would feed the dog and ring a bell. Eventually, he didn't even have to feed the dog, just ring the bell and the dog salivated. If you continued to do that, the dog would very quickly not respond to just the bell if you did not reinforce it occasionally with the food. Remember the way that killer whales are trained.

Look at your map. You will see that the continent of Australia and that Australia is the second closest continent to Antarctica and you will see the southern right whale. The old time sailors called it as such because it was the right whale to kill for oils and so on.

Right at the end of the whaling industry, these southern right whales would swim by the south western portion of Australia and the whales would go up on the west coast and swim up. The killer whales lived in that bay. They formed a cooperative symbiotic relationship with the whalers in the bay. It was based upon both trial and error, operant conditioning, and classical conditioning.

The leader of this pod of killer whales (Sam) and when the right whales would swim by, Sam would come by what he learned to be the leader of the whaling group and he would jump up and down and so on. The men would get on the boats and go out to the bay. The Discovery channel was talking to the two of the older people in the village. They had written records about this.

The whale would come up and splash the water and the whalers would get into their long boats and go out to bay. The killer whales would go out and herd in the right whales into the bay and the killer whales would trouble the whale until it was too tired to get away and then the whalers would harpoon it. This is not bunny rabbits. We're talking about whaling and oceans and men's stuff.

So they would kill the whale. The more interesting part is that when they killed the whale, they would prop its mouth open, and they would anchor the whale to the bottom of the bay, and over the course of the night, so that you will understand, a right way is a bleam whale, and they have these huge tongues the size of all of these tables together, and remember this is a whale, it's big, big animals have big tongues, anyway, they take this tongue and force water through the filters in their mouth called bleam-plates and they catch krill, the whalers would anchor the whale to the bottom after they are dead, and the killer whales would eat the tongue and that's the only part that they would eat.

This went on for about ten or fifteen years. It only happened once or twice a year. One whale feeds a village for a very long time. Then, there was a second group of whalers that came down. Instead of anchoring the whale to the bottom of the bay, they drug it up onto the beach, and that was the last whale that the killer whales ever helped kill in the bay. The cooperative symbiotic relationship had been broken.

It's really an awesome story. Over the weekend, try to find it on discovery.com and search killer whales and Australia. It's a well documented story. They have a whaling museum that documents this whole thing in the written records. It's on the south western tip of Australia. Not the outback.

What is it about human personality that makes us want to do that? His daughter in law's parents were killed in a plane crash. The little kids do not realize what's going on. When somebody is in an accident we want to know what's wrong, what's wrong with the car or the airplane, and so on.

The last type of learning is called association learning and reason. With the exception of maybe four or five or six other animals and we know more all the time, human beings are the only ones capable of insightful behavior, which is where you can take abstract stimuli and create new responses. Give an example.

It is only seemingly unrelated the four objects that he uses as an example. It's not that they are unrelated. They are just mentioned as four separate objects. It seems to be slightly culturally trained or something (that's at least Bryan's thoughts).

Take notes over all that I read. Even textbooks, websites, everything, there are so many lecture notes that I could be coming up with these days and so on.