6 Kasım 2013 Çarşamba

Instinct (After Research 2)



The term Instinct is an action that changes the relationship between an organism and its environment. Instincts are complex behavior patterns like reflexes, which come with inborn and are rather inflexible but they differ from reflexes in their complexity. For instance, the widespread behavior of scratching is common to most birds, reptiles and mammals but for instance, even if foraging for food is a crucial behavior for animals, a single gene can alter it.

When we think the term Instinct as a behavior, which may occur as a result of an external stimulus such as sight of a predator, and an internal stimulus such as hunger, it is claimed that it is useful to distinguish between innate behavior and learned behavior.

Innate behavior is determined by the nervous system. It is usually determined, a given stimulus triggering a given response whereas learned behavior is more or less permanently altered as a result of experience that any individual organism has such as learning to play baseball well.  For instance, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov found out that placing meat powder in a dog’s mouth would cause it to salivate. The dog has learned to respond to a substitute stimulus, the conditioned stimulus.

The conditioned response is the simplest form of learned behavior. It is a response, which is a result of experience so we can say that the principles of conditioning can also be used to train animals to perform tasks that are not innate.

When it comes to monkeys, how human beings learn is one of the most prominent ways we differ from other species. We humans have the ability to transform property and skılls we learn and we are born with from one generation to another. And we have language, which is the unique human trait that allows us to learn complicated and varied skills from each other.  According to some researches related with monkeys, it is indicated that monkeys also have the ability to use tools and learned skills. More interestingly, they do it without the use of language.