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Taxis und Instinkthandlung in der Eirollbewegung der Graugans. I1
... Metabolic support for this energy-demanding activity is provided by changes in visceral organ physiology controlled by the autonomic nervous system under the direction of the CNS. Freezing reactions can be thought of as an example of a fixed action pattern (Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938;Tinbergen 1951), or more specifically, a species-typical defensive behavior (Blanchard and Blanchard 1972;Bolles 1970;Bolles and Fanselow 1980). ...
... The stimuli that elicit reaction and reflex behaviors, called releasers by ethologists, are specific to the response they command: freezing, for example, is an innate reaction to predators (Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938;Tinbergen 1951;Thorpe 1963;Hinde 1966;Bolles 1970;Blanchard 1969b, 1972;Rosen 2004). For example, Hirsch and Bolles (1980) found that two strains of deer mice that were removed from their natural environment for two breeding generations still demonstrated responses specific to the particular predator present in that environment when encountered. ...
Much of the early research in aversive learning concerned motivation and reinforcement in avoidance conditioning and related paradigms. When the field transitioned toward the focus on Pavlovian threat conditioning in isolation, this paved the way for the clear understanding of the psychological principles and neural and molecular mechanisms responsible for this type of learning and memory that has unfolded over recent decades. Currently, avoidance conditioning is being revisited, and with what has been learned about associative aversive learning, rapid progress is being made. We review, below, the literature on the neural substrates critical for learning in instrumental active avoidance tasks and conditioned aversive motivation.
... Additional taxis movements are also involved in the egg rolling, as the goose can adjust the direction of the rolling with lateral movements of the neck. However, if the egg is removed, the bird continues to stretch and bend its neck performing the fixed action pattern in the empty air, without the adjusting lateral movements (Beer 2020;Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938). Other, usually more complex and longer behaviour sequences have a more stochastic nature, in which the behavioural elements follow each other according to various probabilities, and elements can even be omitted or changed. ...
The detailed description of behaviour of the interacting parties is becoming more and more important in human–robot interaction (HRI), especially in social robotics (SR). With the rise in the number of publications, there is a substantial need for the objective and comprehensive description of implemented robot behaviours to ensure comparability and reproducibility of the studies. Ethograms and the meticulous analysis of behaviour was introduced long ago in animal behaviour research (cf. ethology). The adoption of this method in SR and HRI can ensure the desired clarity over robot behaviours, while also providing added benefits during robot development, behaviour modelling and analysis of HRI experiments. We provide an overview of the possible uses and advantages of ethograms in HRI, and propose a general framework for describing behaviour which can be adapted to the requirements of specific studies.
... The presentation of the facts was somewhat uneven, and the interpretation of the facts was contested in different quarters, but the facts continued to travel, and the further one got from the original accounts, the greater became the inaccuracies in the accounts or interpretations of what it was that the ethologists had originally reported. 5 Tinbergen and Lorenz never wrote up in detail the experiments in question, in contrast to their study of the egg-rolling behavior of the graylag goose (Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938). The results of the avian predator experiments, when all was said and done, may have seemed too fragmentary, too incomplete, and too lacking in controls. ...
... In' any given species the outcome of development, beginning with a fertilized egg, is fairly predictable fqi •any morphological traits as well as for species-specific action patterns. Ethologists nad this in mind when they coined the term 'innate behaviour' (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938). They observed that the emergence of some behaviour is a normal and predictable outcome of the developmental process, fairly invariant to environmental fluctuations, including social isolation. ...
The importance of the genome for behaviour has been amply demonstrated by the tools of population genetics. A deeper understanding of the relationship between genes and behaviour requires an investigation of how they influence brain development and neuronal function. This is the objective of neurogenetics.
Rigid genetic control of brain structure in insects is indicated by bilateral symmetry and by the similarity of isogenic brains (in locust). In large parts of the brain (e.g. optic lobes) the role of developmental variability seems to be as limited as in nematodes, but at closer inspection, the growth of at least some brain structures (e.g. mushroom bodies) is influenced by experience, similar to the growth of some vertebrate systems.
The role of individual genes for brain development and brain function is being studied in Drosophila melanogaster. Here, many single gene mutations affecting the brain and behaviour have been isolated. They either alter the development of neural circuits or modify cellular functions of neurones. Mutations of both categories are often remarkably specific (i.e. they influence only certain functional subsystems, leaving others unaffected). Therefore, functional subsystems are to some degree ontogenetic units under independent genetic control. Telling examples are sexual dimorphisms of behaviour and brain structure. The already peripheral separation of functional pathways in the brain seems to be partially due to the selective advantage of independent genetic modifiability of functions.
... The chemical cue concentration is likely higher than the organisms would experience in nature and therefore likely a form of supernormal stimuli. Simply put, supernormal stimuli are bigger and more intense than normal, and elicit a larger than normal response from the animal [2]. Here, the naturally occurring olfactory ...
... The chemical cue concentration is likely higher than the organisms would experience in nature, and therefore likely a supernormal stimulus. Simply put, supernormal stimuli are bigger and more intense than normal, and elicit a larger than normal response from the animal [2]. Here, the naturally occurring olfactory cues indicate habitat; the heightened preference when the stimulus is offered at an intense concentration follows this behavioural pattern. ...
... We consider a behavioral element as innate if it is fully manifested in the earliest interactions with the stimulus (Dewsbury, 1981). A behavioral stereotype may include a fixed-action pattern (FAP, Lorenz and Tinbergen, 1938)-a genetically encoded sequence of behavioral elements constant in the composition and order. Among the exam-ples are such FAPs as prey capture, mating, and selfcleaning. ...
... Modell is quite right: following Lehrman's (1953) critique of Lorenz's theory of instinctive behaviour (e.g. Lorenz 1937;Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938), a shift occurred in the life sciences away from innate and unlearned sources of motivation and action. However, since that time "instinct" has re-emerged in the literature to describe a process encoded in DNA and realized in fixed action patterns that serve the organism's survival and reproductive needs. ...
A large and significant portion of contemporary psychoanalytic theory has given up on the drives. The shift toward object relations in the 1940s and 50s, the scepticism about metapsychology in the latter half of the twentieth century, and a general confusion about the coherence of Freud’s drive theory have all contributed to their slow decline in prominence. There are legitimate criticisms of the drives that deserve attention but the drives themselves require a careful examination before any successful defence of their place in the metapsychology may be mounted. The current paper provides an account of the drives informed by the intellectual history of German and English thought related to the drives and instincts as they came to Freud. This history allows us to clearly distinguish between “drive” (or Trieb) and its conceptual neighbour “instinct” (or Instinkt).
... However, experimental designs for behavioral analyses can hold hidden complications and the outward expression or lack of behavioral responses can unfortunately be misinterpreted. A number of classic and elegant experimental protocols have been designed to elucidate the intentions for and motivations behind social behaviors (Clark and Utez, 1991;Craig, 1918;Lissmann, 1932;Lorenz and Tinbergen, 1938;ter Pelkwijk and Tinbergen, 1937;Tinbergen and Perdeck, 1950), but as the neural mechanisms promoting those behaviors are not entirely known, it is not always simple to compare results from different classic approaches (Morgan, 1894). The purpose of this article is to compare the outcomes of three classic behavioral approaches, using a sympathetically derived sign stimulus (Kleinholz, 1938;Tinbergen, 1939;Korzan et al., 2000b) and analysis of neural and endocrine responsiveness. ...
Neural and endocrine responses provide quantitative measures that can be used for discriminating behavioral output analyses. Experimental design differences often make it difficult to compare results with respect to the mechanisms producing behavioral actions. We hypothesize that comparisons of distinctive behavioral paradigms or modification of social signals can aid in teasing apart the subtle differences in animal responses to social stress. Eyespots are a unique sympathetically activated sign stimulus of the lizard Anolis carolinensis that influence aggression and social dominance. Eyespot formation along with measurements of central and plasma monoamines enable comparison of paired male aggressive interactions with those provoked by a mirror image. The results suggest that experiments employing artificial application of sign stimuli in dyadic interactions amplify behavioral, neural and endocrine responses, and foreshorten behavioral interactions compared to those that develop among pairs naturally. While the use of mirrors to induce aggressive behavior, produces simulated interactions that appear normal, some behavioral, neural and endocrine responses are amplified in these experiments as well. In contrast, mirror image interactions also limit the level of certain behavioral and neuroendocrine responses, as true social communication does not occur during interaction with mirror images, rank relationships can never be established. Multiple experimental approaches, such as combining naturalistic social interactions with virtual exchanges and/or manipulation of sign stimuli, can often provide added depth to understanding the motivation, context, and mechanisms that produces specific behaviors. The addition of endocrine and neural measurements helps identify the contributions of specific behavioral elements to the social processes proceeding.
... Preparedness can be related to a mechanism discovered by Tinbergen and Lorenz concerning Fixed Action Patterns (FAPs) and sign stimuli (Lorenz and Tinbergen 1938;Tinbergen and Perdeck 1950;Tinbergen 1951;Veen et al 2000) -a phenomenon which Gombrich (1977: 87;1978: 5, 6, 7;1982: 285, 286) has alluded to in the context of art regarding certain perceptual features to which humans may be pre-programmed (although, surprisingly, he did not relate this to Palaeolithic depiction with any real conviction, and only then in respect to his own more favoured, but much criticised, projection hypothesis). ...
Although typical viewing perspective is widely accepted as an important and consistent attribute of Upper Palaeolithic Art this feature is in danger of being taken for granted due to its very pervasiveness. Despite several useful principles having been established concerning some more formal aspects of the tradition, this has not involved an analysis of the possible underlying "meaning" involved. As a "convention" which persisted for 20,000 years this suggests there are deeper questions to be asked regarding signification. This essay seeks to answer some of these questions in relation to recent neurocognitive insights and ethological considerations.
... (7) Animals being separated from their environment by the metaphysical gap (Burchard, 2014), they can survive only if they possess an internalized world model, their own proprietary noumenal cosmos stored in their brains, & a facility for detailed preprogrammed action sequence (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938) to be charted based on their private cosmos prior to executing & actually performing the action. ...
(1) Our thesis is that consciousness (C) is a mechanism,
a neural brain mechanism, a dual left/ right brain mechanism.
Receptive fields are increasing to become global
in Brodmann Area 10 (BA10) Ego cluster neurons.
Inner C (IC) resides in the left brain and outer C (OC) in the right brain.
IC is noumenal, OC is phenomenal.
Phenomena are spatial, geometric-continuous, are images.
Noumena are temporal, logical-sequential, are structures.
(2) The precise role of each of two regions BA10,
in either of the left/ right cerebral hemispheres
can be clarified.
Brain, BA10 left: I, in my interior castle and greater abstract universe,
my noumenal cosmos in the temporal sense.
Brain, BA10 right: I, in my environment and larger physical universe,
my noumenal cosmos in its spatial sense.
(3) Kant's Oneness function.
BA 10 provides for oneness (O),
a function of the human mind
identified by Immanuel Kant
as central for experience (E) to occur,
forming a unified general experience,
which he also calls one experience, interconnected experience,
or even experience in general
in his Critiques, expounding transcendental metaphysics.
(4) Ego Cluster & Global Receptive Field, or Field of Receptivity.
The receptive fields of neurons grow progressively larger,
increasing in extent and logical depth along the ventral path
\& eventually become global in the Ego cluster Brodmann Area BA10,
where the white matter tracts of the sensory ventral path terminate.
(5) Top-Down (T-D), Bottom-Up (B-U).
The inner cosmos, our soul, arises as a top-down nearly free creation,
based upon
in almost total disregard of bottom-up constraints,
the chaotic circumstances in the exterior world.
The reason is that the bottom-up approach to interpreting sensory data
is unmanagable, hopelessly inefficient & simply impracticable.
If it ever succeeds, it still is too slow & bound to fail in the end,
due to phenomenal structures being enormously complex and variable.
(6) Internal Structural Historical Record (ISHR).
Our understanding is based on linguistic expressions
for phenomena that we encounter
and register as phenomenal engrams
in the neurons of the brain, through acquisition of the logos
inherent in the relevant aspects of any phenomena,
possessing pre-linguistic structure,
in form of internal structures, counting for historical record, ISHR.
(7) While the human soul reflects the glory of the divine mysteries of the universe, as
we, like no other creature on Earth, uniquely understand the totality of it, with certain
inherent limitations, yet there never will be a time when its true nature & origins are
revealed to any living rational being, Aristotle's rational animal, ζῷον λόγον ἔχων .
(8) To comprehend consciousness we require full & radical holistic thinking, the noumenal
cosmos. We have holistic-cosmic consciousness, our consciousness, a spatiotemporal
developing record-system, it extends to the most distant galaxies, in our noumenal
cosmos, & down to the elementary particles and quantum foam.
(9) The life of the free-floating soul, I am, therefore I am a conscious soul,
although in reverse, effectively is what Descartes was saying, unawares.
Our existence is identical with our consciousness, but nonetheless delivered up to the
futility of fate.
(10) The human conscious existence amounts to a noumenal cosmos, an internally held
world model, which has many antecedents in the history of philosophy.
We can't be conscious of a few things or of part of the world. The point is the
Being-Question (Heidegger, 1935). We are conscious because we are, we exist. Descartes
taken in reverse.
We need this kind of a dual brain dual C.
The reason is that the OC is for the instant,
the present moment in time the current,
momentary scene in the immediate environment,
and future anticipation,
while neurons of IC are for the past,
which provides us with a general experience,
the noumenal cosmos,
upon the basis of which we can form judgment
for the actions of the present and even perform future anticipation.
The present moment is at home in BA10,
the past in the temporal lobes, both inner & outer.
The residence of future anticipation is not yet known,
and constitutes the main purpose of this essay.
... (7) Animals being separated from their environment by the metaphysical gap (Burchard, 2014), they can survive only if they possess an internalized world model, their own proprietary noumenal cosmos stored in their brains, & a facility for detailed preprogrammed action sequence (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938) to be charted based on their private cosmos prior to executing & actually performing the action. ...
Our thesis is that consciousness (C) is a mechanism, a neural brain mechanism, a dual left/ right brain mechanism. Receptive fields are increasing to global in BA10 Ego cluster neurons. Inner C (IC) resides in the left brain and outer C (OC) in the right brain. ICNS is noumenal, OC is phenomenal. Phenomena are spatial, geometric-continuous, are images. Noumena are temporal, logical-sequential, are structures. The precise role of each of two regions BA10, in either of the left/ right cerebral hemispheres can be clarified. Brain, BA10 left: I, in my interior castle and greater abstract universe, my noumenal cosmos in the temporal sense. Brain, BA10 right: I, in my environment and larger physical universe, my noumenal cosmos in its spatial sense. BA 10 provides for oneness(O), a function of the human mind identified by Immanuel Kant as central for experience (E) to occur, forming a unified general experience, which he also calls one experience, interconnected experience, or even experience in general in his Critiques, expounding transcendental metaphysics. (3) Kant's Oneness function. The point of this section is that the Oneness function seems to be executed by the neurons in Brodmann Area 10 (BA10), where the cells form one or more Ego-clusters, and possess global receptive fields at the apical prefrontal cortex, connection point of sensory & motor cortices. In the early stages of sensory cortex, typically V1 occipital visual cortex, those "receptive fields" are thought to be very narrow parcels of the environment, and then expand and increase along a line of visual centers V2, ..., V5 approaching the prefrontal cortex and BA10, where the entire universe, all that we know, is taken into account by each neuron or neuronal cluster in dense dendritical arborizations. It now is known that not only the synaptic network, but protein synthesis inside the neurons is required for memory formation in the brain, research not yet widely recognized and only published within the last weeks, months & years. The global receptivity in BA10 means these neurons are also aware of their own activities, putting a highly practical spin on Descartes's cogito ergo sum, I am because my neurons know or perceive they are interpreting (top-down) the universe and the current scene, including themselves. My neurons are aware, I am aware, that my experience of the universe is my experience. I recognize my instantaneous scene as being my moment, ever this moment of my lifewith all the familiar items around me, that are constituting my household and have been present for me in many years, and thar current scene has always included myself and my FUTURE ANTICIPATION 7 awareness of myself and of it all. This is the core, in slightly different words, of Kant's Transcendental Deduction, both A & B versions taken together. (4) Ego Cluster (EC) & Global Receptive Field (GRF) or Field of Receptivity (GFoR) (5) Top-Down (T-D) VS. Bottom-Up (B-U) (6) Internal Structural Historical Record (ISHR) (7) While the human soul reflects the glory of the divine mysteries of the universe, as we, like no other creature on Earth, uniquely understand the totality of it, with certain inherent limitations, yet there never will be a time when its true nature & origins are revealed to any living rational being, Aristotle's rational animal, zÀon lìgon êqwn. (8) To comprehend consciousness we require full & radical holistic thinking, the noumenal cosmos. We have holistic-cosmic consciousness, our consciousness, a spatiotemporal developing record-system, it extends to the most distant galaxies, in our noumenal cosmos, & down to the elementary particles and quantum foam. (9) The life of the free-floating soul, I am, therefore I am a conscious soul, although in reverse, effectively is what Descartes was saying, unawares. Our existence is identical with our consciousness, but nonetheless delivered up to the futility of fate.2 (10) The human conscious existence amounts to a noumenal cosmos, an internally held world model, which has many antecedents in the history of philosophy. We can't be conscious of a few things or of part of the world. The point is the Being-Question (Heidegger, 1935). We are conscious because we are, we exist. Descartes taken in reverse. We need this kind of a dual brain dual C. The reason is that he OC is for the instant, the present moment in time the current, momentary scene in the immediate environment, while neurons IC is for the past, which provides us with a general experience, the noumenal cosmos, upon the basis of which we can form judgment for the actions of the present and even perform future anticipation (red). The present moment (green) is at home in BA10, the past (blue) in the temporal lobes, both inner & outer. The residence of future anticipation is not yet known, and constitutes the main purpose of this essay.
... Litvin & Syroechkovsky (1984) described in detail the behaviour of a pair observed doing so, in which they stated that geese did not necessarily lay eggs directly into a nest. Because incubating females will draw eggs into their own nests when situated < 1 m from the edge of their nests, eggs laid in close proximity have a chance of being manoeuvred into the nest (Syroechkovski 2016), because of the female's innate behaviour of egg retrieval (Lorenz & Tinbergen 1938). Limited nesting space was considered the reason for Blue Lesser Snow Geese in Canada dumping eggs (Prevett et al. 1972) and on Kolguev Island in the Barents Sea inter-specific egg-dumping was also considered the result of exceptionally high local densities of arctic-nesting geese (Kruckenberg et al. 2008;Kondratyev et al. 2013). ...
Large egg dumps of more than 100 eggs were observed on an island with colonial-breeding Greylag Geese Anser anser during an aerial survey in 2012. Observations made during subsequent visits to the island found extremely high goose breeding densities with low hatching success. These observations are discussed in relation to studies of density dependence in Greylag Geese and other goose species.
... These ethologists focused on complex natural movements that include distinct elements in a stereotypical sequence, though they assumed that the capacity to produce these sequences is innate. An example of a fixed action pattern is the egg-rolling behavior of the graylag goose (Lorenz and Tinbergen, 1939). When a female goose sees an egg in front of her nest, she moves her neck and bill to roll the egg toward the nest. ...
Central pattern generators (CPGs) are central nervous system (CNS) networks that can generate coordinated output in the absence of patterned sensory input. For decades, this concept was applied almost exclusively to simple, innate, rhythmic movements with essentially identical cycles that repeat continually (e.g. respiration) or episodically (e.g. locomotion). But many natural movement sequences are not simple rhythms, as they include different elements in a complex order, and some involve learning. The concepts and experimental approaches of CPG research have also been applied to the neural control of complex movement sequences, such as birdsong, though this is not widely appreciated. Experimental approaches to the investigation of CPG networks, both for simple rhythms and for complex activity sequences, have shown that: (1) brief activation of the CPG elicits a long-lasting naturalistic activity sequence; (2) electrical stimulation of CPG elements alters the timing of subsequent cycles or sequence elements; and (3) warming or cooling CPG elements respectively speeds up or slows down the rhythm or sequence rate. The CPG concept has also been applied to the activity rhythms of populations of mammalian cortical neurons. CPG concepts and methods might further be applied to a variety of fixed action patterns typically used in courtship, rivalry, nest building and prey capture. These complex movements could be generated by CPGs within CPGs ('nested' CPGs). Stereotypical, non-motor, non-rhythmic neuronal activity sequences may also be generated by CPGs. My goal here is to highlight previous applications of the CPG concept to complex but stereotypical activity sequences and to suggest additional possible applications, which might provoke new hypotheses and experiments.
... As Bischof explains, FAPs already include a flexibilizing taxis component, which serves to bring the organism in an appropriate position for executing a FAP. In a simple case, this can be an orienting response in the sense of Lorenz (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938), which is adjusting the organism's spatial orientation for successful FAP execution. Taxis is informed by the nonspecific perception system, and modifies where and how the FAP is executed. ...
... (7) Animals being separated from their environment by the metaphysical gap (Burchard, 2014), they can survive only if they possess an internalized world model, their own proprietary noumenal cosmos stored in their brains, & a facility for detailed preprogrammed action sequence (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938) to be charted based on their private cosmos prior to executing & actually performing the action. ...
My current project, not likely to be published on account of my advancing age (now 83). Current neuroscience largely supplies all that is needed to lift the veil of the deepest mystery of all mysteries, our ontological brain, a world-maker, the "noumenal cosmos," first mentioned in my 2005 article in Foundations of Science (Springer), actually 28 June 2002 as rough draft sent to C.F. von Weizsaecker's in honor of his 90th birthday, but he gave it to someone else because he wrote he was too old to read it. In his days the easy cure of Alzheimer's was not yet known, and he sadly succumbed to the disease (as I believe, 2nd hand info). The main point of my string of five papers, this unpublished one being #5, with @1-4 in print, is a three-part series of steps toward a holistic understanding of existence, human life & all-biotic, esp. animalian:
Step 1.) that the left-right brain laterality is now confirming Immanuel Kant's pair of senses: His inner sense being left-hemispherical, temporal, sequential-logical, noumenal, good for imagined objects of thought in time (=noumena in his terminology), & his outer sense is right-brain, spatial, geometric, phenomenal for observed objects in space. Brenda Milner, McGill University, has been awarded the 2014 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience by the Norwegian Academy for her pioneering work on brain laterality, but a vast literature is emerging of new details by many distinguished workers. This sensational connection of 18th century desk work composed with a goose quill & 21st century neuro-lab work still largely remains off-side in our splintered academic set-up.
Step 2.) that the receptive fields of neurons, lately more & more in play, is growing along dorsal & ventral sensory white matter tracts progressively, until in the frontopolar (Brodmann Area 10) Ego clusters, neurons have global receptive fields, explaining consciousness as occurring in the ultra-dense dendritic arborizations of the giant pyramidal neurons (see Jirenhed et al, 2017, for memory storage inside giant neurons, also Ramirez, Tonegawa & Liu, 2014). Being global, these clusters watch their own actions, giving organismic substance to Kant's self-observation within the noumenal cosmos of his "general experience" as a necessary part of perception, as the core of his famous "Transcendental Deduction", or vague ideas such as the "strange loops" (Douglas Hofstadter), etc.
Step 3.) that a combination of steps 1 & 2 leads to an emergent explanation of our ontological experience, what Heidegger has expressed succinctly as "being in the world:" From the simple sensory-action loop of animal neural structure, the two-hemisphere split has evolved, at least in vertebrates I believe, with Kant's discovery of the division into an inner, noumenal, self-directed loop & and an outer, phenomenal, environment-directed loop. The dual worlds are of course communicating via the corpus callosum, but my consciousness remains split in two, awareness of what occurs in the environment and how I feel about it. Evolutionary advantages of this dual arrangement are obvious, permitting left brain analysis of phenomena aiding anticipation of events and top-down identification of environmental features by means of Kant's Jugdment-Power residing in the noumenal cosmos, mitigating the hopelessly slow process of bottom-up edge-detection, etc etc, upon which no animal could rely and expect to survive very long in this dog-eat-dog world of ours.
... Behavior that does not adjust in a way as to increase or decrease the probability of occurrence of a certain event, is not directly selected. Some parts of "released behavior" such as the Greylag goose's egg retrieval movement (Lorenz & Tinbergen, 1938) are an example of behavior that does not directly result from selective processes, neither during ontogeny, nor during phylogeny. If an egg becomes displaced from the nest, Greylag geese roll it back to the nest with their beak. ...
The behavioral phenotype of an organism results from selective processes acting on variation in behavioral traits during ontogeny (during life span) and phylogeny (across generations). Different adaptive processes can be categorized as environment-phenotype feedback loops. In this cross-disciplinary approach, we discuss the interaction of ontogenetic selective processes, traditionally studied by behavior analysts, and phylogenetic selection processes, traditionally studied by biologists. We elaborate upon the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by addressing the connection between selection as a domain-general process and phenomena such as classical and operant conditioning, imprinting, adjunctive behavior, and gene-culture coevolution. Selection is in this context understood as a dynamic iterative feedback loop producing a phenotype beyond the strict morphotype. The extended phenotype is related to the concept of niche construction in which the behavior of organisms shapes their environment, which again selects the behavior of the organisms in an iterative process. A discussion of interacting environmental factors selecting human food choice both during phylogeny and ontogeny exemplifies the generality of selection processes acting on behavior.
... "Fixed action patterns," while controversial (e.g. 12 ), may be insensitive to environmental feedback and hence not intentional in our sense; the classic example is egg rolling behavior by graylag geese. 13 If the egg is removed from under the bird"s bill before the behavior has returned the egg to the nest, the goose nonetheless completes the entire behavior. ...
We previously published a description of discovery of a site where octopuses live in an unusually dense collection of individual dens near one another in a bed of scallop shells amid a rock outcrop. We believe the shell bed is an extended midden, accumulated over time by individual octopuses returning to their dens with food. Here we consider what aspects of material collection, den maintenance, and aggregation are intentional for the octopuses, versus inadvertent consequences of individual decisions. Collection of prey items, transport of prey to the den, den excavation, and collection and use of non-prey materials at the den appear to be intentional behaviors. The occurrence of many dens in close aggregation appears to be an inadvertent outcome of the availability of food and the risk of predation in the habitat. Popular media reports have described this site as an ‘city’ designed by octopuses, but that is not an accurate description of the site.
... Todorov and Jordan, 2002). However, some stereotyped behaviors proceed to completion irrespective of task-specific feedback (Lorenz and Tinbergen, 1938;Willows, 1967;Barlow, 1968). Moreover, even when movement execution can be stabilized by feedback, the template of an intended movement still corresponds to a dynamical system, whose stability remains relevant. ...
The function of the brain is unlikely to be understood without an accurate description of its output, yet the nature of movement elements and their organization remains an open problem. Here, movement elements are identified from dynamics of walking in flies, using unbiased criteria. On one time scale, dynamics of walking are consistent over hundreds of milliseconds, allowing elementary features to be defined. Over longer periods, walking is well described by a stochastic process composed of these elementary features, and a generative model of this process reproduces individual behavior sequences accurately over seconds or longer. Within elementary features, velocities diverge, suggesting that dynamical stability of movement elements is a weak behavioral constraint. Rather, long-term instability can be limited by the finite memory between these elementary features. This structure suggests how complex dynamics may arise in biological systems from elements whose combination need not be tuned for dynamic stability.
... McFarlend (1988) not only considers behavior to be a component of the phenotype but uses a series of derived and associated notions, such as phenotypical adaptations. The basic points of the concept (within the framework of which behavior is considered an inherited trait as a part of the phenotype) were stated in works by Lorenz and Tinbergen (1939), who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973. ...
Clado- and semogenetic approaches, when used in concert, make it possible to resolve questions concerning the phylogenetic relationships between group representatives, as well as the phylogenesis of those representatives’ characters. Parental care patterns and other forms of reproductive behavior, along with the reproductive strategy as a whole, can be the subject of semogenetic analysis to no less an extent than morphological structures sensu stricto. One highly specialized form of parental care in fish, including representatives of the suborder of labyrinth fishes and their sister groups, appears to be parental food provisioning. In our view, the evolutionary origin of postembryonic brood provisioning in bony fishes is characterized by three main features: (1) in fish, different forms of postembryonic food provisioning are convergent in their origin; (2) any kind of brood provisioning is realized through exploitation of the already existing character and is maintained by selection due to an enhancement of offspring fitness; (3) the main evolutionary path of the emergence and development of this phenomenon consists in function expansion and replacement. The hypothesis does have heuristic power, since it enables prediction of the presence of the reproductive strategy component in question through the identification of adequate basic adaptations. Although parental care occurs in the majority of anabantoid fishes, there are still several species for which such care is not known. On the cladogram, these species by no means take the basal position but are surrounded by fishes that provide care for their eggs, or even their hatchlings. The parsimony principle leads to the suggestion that parental care is a plesiomorphic character in the suborder Anabantoidei (or in the order Anabantiformes). It seems that the ancestors of present day noncarrying species that take various positions within this phylogenetic group were fishes showing parental care. Their reproductive strategy later changed as a result of r selection. If this hypothesis is correct, the absence of parental care should be considered a case of reproductive strategy degradation. It is quite probable that parental food provisioning was a component of the ancestral reproductive strategies. It is also possible that the reproductive strategy of present-day anabantoids that supposedly do not care for their offspring actually includes some optional forms of parental care.
... Under N. Tinbergen's influence, Lorenz subse- quently refrained from using the concept of schema as applied to the image of an object and, beginning from the 1950s, replaced the term "innate releasing schema" with "innate releasing mechanism" (in German, ange- borener auslösender Mechanismus). The latter term first appeared in their joint paper (Lorenz and Tinbergen, 1938). ...
Konrad Lorentz (1903-1989), the founder of ethology, was an adherent of an objective study of animal behavior. According to this approach, which became a credo of ethology, the subjective animal world is beyond scientific knowledge and animal mind. However, the fact the Lorentz's thoughts on the subjective experience of animals played an important part in developing the theoretical fundamentals of his concept has received little attention. Taking into account subjective phenomena, Lorentz could reveal specific patterns of instinctive animal behavior. Only at the final stage of developing the classical theory of ethology, he neglected the subjective aspects of animal behavior. Lorentz believed that animal psychology aimed to study animal mind was impossible, but he kept having interest in this subject over all his life. He was also convinced that our assumption about the existence of subjective experience in animals was a priory belief, but not a conclusion drawn by analogy.
... From the first example used to describe and define the FAP, the egg retrieval behavior of geese (Tinbergen & Lorenz, 1938), it was recognized that while some aspects of the action are invariant, others are variable. The invariant components include the goose's use of the bill, rather than the feet or the wings, to retrieve the egg. ...
After these rather theoretical considerations on the cognitive components of tool use, let us now turn to some experiments that have been used to test them. The most studied abilities are causal understanding and planning. Both are considered important not only for creative, flexible tool use but also as forms of understanding and thinking that are most distinct from trial-and-error learning.
In mammals, offspring vocalizations typically encode information about identity and body condition, allowing parents to limit alloparenting and adjust care. But how do these vocalizations mediate parental behavior in species faced with the problem of rearing not one, but multiple offspring, such as domestic dogs? Comprehensive acoustic analyses of 4,400 whines recorded from 220 Beagle puppies in 40 litters revealed litter and individual (within litter) differences in call acoustic structure. By then playing resynthesized whines to mothers, we showed that they provided more care to their litters, and were more likely to carry the emitting loudspeaker to the nest, in response to whine variants derived from their own puppies than from strangers. Importantly, care provisioning was attenuated by experimentally moving the fundamental frequency ( f o , perceived as pitch) of their own puppies’ whines outside their litter-specific range. Within most litters, we found a negative relationship between puppies’ whine f o and body weight. Consistent with this, playbacks showed that maternal care was stronger in response to high-pitched whine variants simulating relatively small offspring within their own litter’s range compared to lower-pitched variants simulating larger offspring. We thus show that maternal care in a litter-rearing species relies on a dual assessment of offspring identity and condition, largely based on level-specific inter- and intra-litter variation in offspring call f o . This dual encoding system highlights how, even in a long-domesticated species, vocalizations reflect selective pressures to meet species-specific needs. Comparative work should now investigate whether similar communication systems have convergently evolved in other litter-rearing species.
Bitcoin is one of those less common financial innovations that threatens to upend the status quo in a more general sense. This not only instils fear in some decision-makers but loathing too. Which leads to an interesting question. That is, how does fear work itself into the construction of a Savage "Small World"? What happens if something terrifying is thought to be lurking in one of Weitzman's boxes? Fear disrupts the very nature, the very structure, of search and decision.
At birth, infants show a sophisticated behavioral repertoire that serves their need to share the subjective experience of others. These dispositions have their antecedents in a “motor intentionality” that emerges during the intrauterine period. We will describe the trajectories of intersubjectivity across the first 2 years of life and illustrate how the interactions with psycho-biologically attuned parents affect the maturation of infants’ brains. This knowledge may guide clinical interventions aimed at supporting parent-infant relationships.
Though well established in mammals, the cognitive map hypothesis has engendered a decades-long, ongoing debate in insect navigation studies involving many of the field's most prominent researchers. In this paper, I situate the debate within the broader context of 20th century animal behavior research and argue that the debate persists because competing research groups are guided by different constellations of epistemic aims, theoretical commitments, preferred animal subjects, and investigative practices. The expanded history of the cognitive map provided in this paper shows that more is at stake in the cognitive map debate than the truth value of propositions characterizing insect cognition. What is at stake is the future direction of an extraordinarily productive tradition of insect navigation research stretching back to Karl von Frisch. Disciplinary labels like ethology, comparative psychology, and behaviorism became less relevant at the turn of the 21st century, but as I show, the different ways of knowing animals associated with these disciplines continue to motivate debates about animal cognition. This examination of scientific disagreement surrounding the cognitive map hypothesis also has significant consequences for philosophers' use of cognitive map research as a case study.
Wie bereits erwähnt, ist unklar, in welchem Rahmen der folgende Vortrag von Konrad Lorenz gehalten wurde, insbesondere, ob er möglicherweise nachträglich in die Vortragsreihe des Psychologischen Instituts aufgenommen wurde.
Like Darwin’s works and theories, the studies and discoveries produced by ethology (a research area of which the great naturalist was the first promoter) inspired not one, but two scientific revolutions. The second is still in progress. As with the first Darwinian revolution, some of the theoretical, social and ethical implications of the first ethological revolution have long been distorted, partly even by its own promoters. It has been arbitrarily used to support forms of behavioural determinism according to which all aspects of animal and human minds and activities are substantially regulated by hereditary mechanisms that are scarcely modifiable through experience, education, culture and socio-environmental stimuli. One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate that this form of ethological mechanicism and social biologism can now be refuted with the theoretical and methodological, empirical and experimental tools of biology and ethology themselves. To this aim the present chapter contributes through a critical review of the two Darwinian revolutions, of the first ethological revolution, and of some of their interpretations that had a wide echo. It also introduces an analysis of some aspects of the second, ongoing ethological revolution, and of contemporary evolutionary studies, which are further examined in the following sections of the book, showing that developments in both these areas are converging towards a post-mechanistic model of animal behaviour and a post-genocentric explanation of evolutionary processes. In this chapter I try to show that, with respect to these developments, the Darwinism of Darwin is demonstrating a fruitfulness, a resilience, and an attitude to frame phenomena that at the time of its formulation were unknown, far superior to that of all the “neo-Darwinian” models which predominated in evolutionary biology after Darwin. That is to say that, at least since August Weismann’s Germinal Selection (Weismann 1896), to Jacques Monod’s Le hasard et la nécessité (Monod 1970), Darwin’s Darwinism, although focused on the concept of natural selection, implied an explanatory pluralism and a series of (albeit critical and cautious) openings to the possibility of “Lamarckian” forms of inheritance rejected by subsequent neo-Darwinist models in defence of a supposed Darwinian “orthodoxy” only to be once again re-evaluated by contemporary epigenetics. In the following pages I attempt to summarize the outcomes both of the two Darwinian and the first ethological revolutions, highlighting their nature as flows of ensuing scientific-cultural events, the implications of which are in many respects still at stake, open-ended and ongoing. The scientific revolutions discussed in these pages are in fact only mere stages of a long, single, internally conflicting and composite revolutionary process that leads from Darwin’s proto-ethology to contemporary ethology.
The development of current technologies for neurophysiological research has made it possible to observe the activity of large numbers of neurons involved in the operation of distributed neural neurons in the whole brain. An important aspect of such studies is the stability of the signal being recorded, which determines the ability to make recordings from a single cell for prolonged periods. The aim of the present work was to assess the possibility of using chronically implanted multiple microwires for stable recording of the activity of individual neurons in the rabbit brain. Experiments were performed on two adult male European rabbits (Orictolagus cuniculus), in which bundles of microwires were implanted in the amygdala. Experimental data were captured over periods of 72 days in rabbit No. 1 and 964 days in rabbit No. 2. Assessment of neuron signal recording quality showed that the recording device used here made high-quality recordings of the activity of single neurons over long periods. Use of an automated algorithm identified stable recordings of single neurons, which in future will provide for multifaceted investigations of changes in the activity of brain cells with complex behavior.
In today's marine habitats, anthropogenic noise is widespread in space and time, affecting aquatic animal communities. Short-term exposure to noise is known to affect vital behaviours, such as the ability to evade predators. However, long-term noise pollution may lead to differences in short-term responses between naïve and experienced animals. We investigated the interaction between short-term and long-term sound exposure on the antipredator response of free-ranging sand gobies, Pomatoschistus minutus. We tested the effects of short-term boat noise playback on the response to a simulated predator strike in areas across a range of low to high long-term noise disturbance levels. Exposure to boat noise did not affect the startle response, time frozen or response latency of gobies to a predator stimulus. However, individuals exposed to short-term boat noise playback were absent from the experimental area for shorter periods after the predator strike than gobies exposed to the silent control. Moreover, gobies in long-term noisy habitats also stopped avoiding the area after the predator strike under silent control conditions. These changes point to a decreased magnitude in antipredator response, as a function of interacting short- and longer-term levels of disturbance. Thus, prey species alter their antipredator behaviour in ways that can potentially lead to higher mortality for individual prey. This could ultimately have implications at the level of the food web.
Zusammenfassung
In heutigen Schwangerschaftsratgebern ist oft von einem Nestbauinstinkt zu lesen. Demnach würden Schwangere von einem Trieb ergriffen, die passende Umwelt für ihr Kind zu gestalten, also Babyausstattung zu kaufen oder die Wohnung zu putzen. Dabei bildet das Konzept des Nestbauinstinkts eine spezifische Wissenskonfiguration: Während es im populären Bereich verbreitet ist, nimmt es im wissenschaftlichen Bereich eine marginale Position ein. Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll der historischen Epistemologie dieser Wissensform nachgegangen werden. Im Vordergrund stehen folgende Fragen: Wie formierte sich das Wissen um einen Nestbauinstinkt in der Schwangerschaft? Auf welche Weise wurde das Nest als spezifische natural-anthropogene Umwelt hergestellt? Und inwiefern interagieren hier Vorstellungen von Geschlecht und Umwelt? Dazu nimmt die wissensgeschichtliche Analyse die Perspektive einer longue durée vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute ein. Die Untersuchung ergibt eine graduelle Feminisierung des Umweltkonzepts im Wissen des Nestbauinstinkts. Während er im 19. Jahrhundert oft als männliches Verhaltensmuster galt und das Nest ein Analogon zum Wohnhaus bildete, transformierte sich der Instinkt in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts zu einer primär weiblichen Eigenschaft, bei der das Nest für den Innenraum des Zuhauses stand. Dabei zirkulierte das Wissen zwischen verschiedenen Bereichen, wofür eine maßgebliche Bedingung war, dass sich das Nest zum ‚metaphorischen Ding‘ wandelte. Als solches führte das Nest nicht einfach zu einer Naturalisierung, sondern bezeichnete einen familiären natural-sozialen Zwischenraum, der zunehmend zum Ziel weiblich konnotierter Sorge-Arbeit wurde.
Egg retrieval is a common behaviour among ground-nesting birds and a key part of their parental care. This paper deals with an experimental study of that behaviour in four Sicilian populations of Stone curlew, considering not only the success in retrieving but also the time latency in the bird reacting to the sight of an egg displaced from its nest and the relative retrieval time, which are two parameters that have been ignored until now by other studies. Egg displacements were made in 36 nests at the same distance of 50 cm. In each nest, two egg displacements were made, one in the first and the other in the second half of the brooding period, at a mean distance of 12.5 ± 3.5 days. In only seven out of 67 valid tests, the egg remained unretrieved, confirming the ability of Stone curlew to roll in their eggs. None of the factors considered as predictors had a significant effect on the success of the retrieval. Latency and retrieval times resulted positively correlated to each other, and were not statistically different among the four populations tested, nevertheless, showing a high variability even within the same population. In nine cases the retrieval was performed by the two parents acting in turn, however, in these cases the retrieval and not the latency times turned out to be longer with respect to the retrievals made by only one bird. When the retrieval times of the first displacement were compared to those of the second, the latter were shorter. The retrieval times are influenced by the ground conformation, being shorter in agricultural sites where the ground is plain and levelled. Indeed the GLMM analyses suggest a significant influence of different external factors on both the latency and retrieval times.
Niko Tinbergen characterized ethology as ‘the biological study of behaviour’ involving four kinds of question: causation, ontogeny, adaptive function and phyletic evolution (Tinbergen, 1963; Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410–433). He said the science should give equal attention to each and to their integration. This division was prefigured in his book The study of instinct (Tinbergen, 1951; Oxford University Press). The book offered a conception of instinct as a built-in motivational system analogous to a hydraulic mechanism. The assumption of innateness and the lack of physiological credibility of the instinct model met with adverse criticism, which Tinbergen conceded to a large extent. His later work concentrated on functional issues, which anticipated the direction dominating subsequent ethological studies. Nevertheless Tinbergen's four questions, and his insistence that they be given equal attention continue to present an agenda for ethological aspiration.
Konrad Lorenz, cofounder of ethology (the study of the biology of organism behavior), ranks among the most important stewards of Darwin's heritage. A stern critic of the vitalistic concept of instinct and of the behaviorists' doctrines of the 'empty organism' that is predominantly environmentally controlled, Lorenz advocated a bottom-up analysis of behavior, stressing the importance of observation and inductive reasoning. This led to the discovery of a basically modular structure of behavior including 'fixed action patterns' controlled by internal variables and external 'key stimuli' coordinated by specific 'innate releasing mechanisms.' Learning occurs on these modular levels, e.g., as in 'imprinting.' Lorenz became one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology (Seewiesen), the leading institution for behavioral research in Germany. Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Medicine 'for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns.' After his retirement, Lorenz returned to his native Austria, continued his work on graylag goose's social behavior and in evolutionary epistemology, and became an influential opponent of nuclear power and environmental degradation.
The history of zoosociology development in the period from the late 19th century up to the 1970s is discussed. Its goal has been from the beginning to uncover the principles of organization operating in the local animal populations that are considered as social organisms of complex systemic nature. Later on, the main such factors appeared to be the activity called “social behaviour”. It is shown how different scientific schools were dealing with the problems. Each of them may be regarded as being committed generally to one of the two worldview attitudes, methodologically quite different. One is the elementarism that traditionally treats the system by reducing it to certain elements understood as given in the first place and constant in their properties. The other trend is the holism: the whole is stated as a foundation and may be divided into parts by many various ways. It is the very dividing method that determines, in fact, the properties of the parts obtained. The former trend is seen as characteristic of the classical ethology and sociobiology, the latter one appears to be a cornerstone of views by A. Espinas, W. Allee, V. Wynne-Edwards and J. Crook, that laid the basis for socioecology.
The ability to stop ongoing movement is fundamental to animal survival. Behavioural arrest involves the hierarchical integration of information throughout the forebrain, which ultimately leads to the coordinated inhibition and activation of specific brainstem motor centres. Recent advances have shed light on multiple regions and pathways involved in this critical behavioural process. Here, we synthesize these new findings together with previous work to build a more complete understanding of the circuit mechanisms underlying suppression of ongoing action. We focus on three specific conditions leading to behavioural arrest: goal completion, fear and startle. We outline the circuitry responsible for the production of these behaviours and discuss their dysfunction in neurological disease.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Movement suppression: brain mechanisms for stopping and stillness’.
Affects and their conscious representations, emotions, are the central agents of social organization in humans and non-human animals. These are bio-psychological phenomena with morphological and physiological substrates, with evolutionary functions, modulated in ontogeny and conservatively preserved in evolutionary history. Emotions “motivate” social interactions/relationships and emotionality is directly linked with basic physiology, particularly with the stress systems and also, with the most important “anti-stress” complex in mammals, the oxytocin-attachment system, which has also a major role in bonding. Emotional phenotype (“temperament”) affects social connectedness and finally, fitness in complex social systems. And there is also a clear link to social cognition, as affects are involved in virtually any decision made by the relevant brain centers in mammals and birds. Finally, the communication of emotions and satisfying each others emotional need is also at the core of human–animal relationships, which may be considered as indirect evidence for common principles of social organization.
This book discusses how facts travel, and when and why they sometimes travel well enough to acquire a life of their own. Whether or not facts travel in this manner depends not only on their character and ability to play useful roles elsewhere, but also on the labels, packaging, vehicles and company that take them across difficult terrains and over disciplinary boundaries. These diverse stories of travelling facts, ranging from architecture to nanotechnology and from romance fiction to climate science, change the way we see the nature of facts. Facts are far from the bland and rather boring but useful objects that scientists and humanists produce and fit together to make narratives, arguments and evidence. Rather, their extraordinary abilities to travel well shows when, how and why facts can be used to build further knowledge beyond and away from their sites of original production and intended use.
Nieuwe feiten over de sociologie van de zilvermeeuwen
- Boy H. L.
Enkele proeven over het ei als broedobject
- Tinbergen N.
Zukunft der Psychologie
- K. Bühler
Zur Soziologie der Silbermöwe (Larus a. argentatus Pontopp.)
- Tinbergen N.
Waarnemingen en proeven over de sociologie van een zilvermeeuwenkolonie
- Tinbergen N.