Toward instinctive behaviour

From great number of commands one can teach a pet dog the easiest is a command “give me your paw! ” Your dog will readily give you its front paw; in some cases this action even does not demand any reward. However if you try to teach the dog to give you its hind leg, it takes much time and efforts. This is an example of the use of an innate behavioural pattern in training. The fact is that character movements with front paws are involved in early behaviour of infant dogs: when sucking their mother puppies perform character massing movements of mammalians with their front paws. Dog breeders call this behaviour with a German word “Milchtritt”. When puppies are growing up, a mother dog often feeds them upright posing as the legendary Capitol Mother Wolf does. Sucking puppies have to crane their necks and mass mammalians with one front paw leaning a mass of the body on the second one. This behavioural pattern will manifest themselves in adults in different contexts. A dog extends its front paw as a gesture of obedience. If you sit in front of a timid dog and begin to talk to it angrily, it is most likely that the dog will give you its paw as a gesture of apology.

Circus trainers have built on innate gifts of animals for ages. Cats of different sizes, from lions and tigers to pussy cats hitting the mark by exact jumping, sea lions balancing with balls, and many other animals that extend their innate repertoires by trainers’ tutoring and thus amaze audience are amongst these examples.

As we have seen from data in previous issues, it became obvious that the abilities of different animals to solve problems were tuned to the circumstances in which they live. This view dramatically contradicts with a fundamental concept of Skinnerian branch of behaviourism that any organism can be taught to accomplish practically any behaviour if it possess relevant organs to perform and a patient trainer to shape its behavioural sequence within relevant course. These were Skinner’s former students, Keller and Marian Brelands who pecked through his concept with publishing in 1961 “The misbehavior of organisms” (this title parodies the title of Skinner’s 1938 book “The Behavior of Organisms: an experimental analysis”). In it, they summarised 14-years experience in the engineering control of animal behaviour by operant conditioning techniques. By 50-s, conditioned behaviour has been exhibited in various zoos, fairs, tourist attractions, and television shows. However, thoughtful animal trainers have run afoul of a persistent pattern of discomforting failures. In their paper Brelands gave several concrete examples of how their intentions of being good behaviourists were baffled by misbehaviour of animals they worked with. Among those examples, the first concerned “danced chicken”. Well, they readily “danced” i.e., scratched vigorously, round and round, over the disc for 15 seconds, at the rate of about two scratches per second until the automatic feeder fires in the retaining compartment. The chicken goes into the compartment to eat, thereby automatically shutting the door. The popular interpretation of this behaviour pattern is that the chicken has turned on the " juke box" and " dances." The development of this behavioural exhibit was wholly unplanned. In the attempt to create quite another type of demonstration which required a chicken simply to stand still on a platform for 12-15 seconds, the authors found that over 50% developed a very strong and pronounced scratch pattern, which tended to increase in persistence as the time interval was lengthened (another 25% or so developed other behaviours - pecking at spots, etc.). So it is hardly a practicable problem to teach a chick to stand still.

The last example - after, say, an example with a racoon which spent more and more time rubbing coins together (in a most miserly fashion) instead of dipping them into container, a pattern that was reinforced, - was a pig that was conditioned to pick up large wooden coins and deposit them in a large " piggy bank", a funny show if it would be practicable. At first the pig would eagerly pick up one “dollar”, carry it to the bank, run back, get another; carry it rapidly and neatly, and so on, until the ratio was complete. Thereafter, over a period of weeks the behaviour would become slower and slower. It might run over eagerly for each dollar, but on the way back, instead of carrying the dollar and depositing it simply and cleanly, it would repeatedly drop it, root it, drop it again, root it along the way, pick it up, toss it up in the air, drop it, root it some more, and so on. The behaviour persisted and gained in strength in spite of a severely increased drive - it finally went through the ratios so slowly that it did not get enough to eat in the course of the day. This problem behaviour developed repeatedly in successive pigs.

In some animals of different species, after the behaviour was conditioned to a specific learned response it gradually drifted into behaviours that were entirely different from those which were conditioned. It can easily be seen that these particular behaviours to which the animals drifted were clear-cut examples of instinctive behaviours having to do with the natural food getting behaviours of the particular species. “Washing behaviour” of racoons, rooting or shaking behaviours of pigs, scratching and pecking in chicks are strongly built into the species and are connected with the food getting repertoire.

Brelands termed this phenomenon " instinctive drift ": wherever an animal has strong instinctive behaviours in the area of a conditioned response, after continued running the organism will drift toward the instinctive behaviour to the detriment of the conditioned behaviour and even to the delay or preclusion of the reinforcement. In a simplified form, it might be stated as " learned behaviour drifts toward instinctive behaviour."

It was Brelands’ conclusion that the behaviour of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche. The most important behaviouristic assumptions turned out to be wrong: that an animal comes to the laboratory as a virtual “tabula rasa”, that species differences are insignificant, and that all responses are conditionable to all stimuli.

These ideas have helped to clarify interpretation of many results produced by behaviourists. In fact, Brelands were first to become Skinner’s satellites, stroked with his trained pigeons, and especially those who played bowling. Later a natural explanation of pigeons’ skilfulness was suggested: it was likely that that pigeons’ trainers built on innate pigeon’s foraging behaviour, that is, the manner of birds to throw soil off in order to get seeds. This suggestion was supported by observations of how pigeons pecked a key in Skinner’s chamber when they were expected to be rewarded by food grains or by water. Students who were asked to watch filmed trials and to distinguish for what kind of award were the pigeons waiting, never did mistakes. Pigeons that pecked for food did this with sharp pecks by opened beaks, whereas those birds that pecked for water did this with closed beak and touched the key much longer (Moore, 1973). Remember, for instance, how a dog runs to a kitchen licking its lips in anticipation when it hears a call “doggy, take this! ” but nor smells neither sees the food yet.

Much evidence has been obtained of specific relations between animals’ actions and kinds of expected rewards. For instance, Shettleworth (1972, 1975) revealed 24 behavours in hamsters, and some of them excluded other ones. Thus, those behavioural acts which were connected with locomotion increased in expectation of feeding time, whereas comforting and scenting were depressed. It was easy to teach hamsters to do some actions - such as digging, running, and scratching- much more frequently during period preceding feeding. However, it was practically impossible to teach them to perform other behaviours on the threshold of feeding time, such as washing and scenting territory.

In Chapter 1 I cited the example from the book of Morgan (1900), a founder of objective studies of animal intelligence. Morgan described skilfulness of sheepdogs as an illustration of what he considered animal intelligence. As Morgan gave this, an intelligent animal is what it is trained to be, its natural powers are under complete control of his master, with whom the whole plan of action lies. In the light of ideas of modern ethology, we know that a real picture is not so simple. Untrained sheepdogs have an innate tendency to run around a group of sheep and herd them back towards the shepherd. Possibly the dog regards the human as a participant in a hunt for food. A master builds on this natural herding tendency and trains the dog to drive sheep in response to shouts and whistles. Apparently it is difficult to train a sheepdog to drive sheep away from a human, and to leave one group of sheep to go and gather more. This difficulty is caused by a contradiction between trainer’s desire and animals’ innate predisposition for definite behaviours in a context of a situation.

There are many illustrative examples in this field. For instance, in experiments of Sevenster (1968) male sticklebacks were trained to perform two tasks in order to gain an access to a female ready to court. One thing was easy to train: males quickly learned to swim through a ring in order to reach a female. However, they hardly learned to bait a stick in order to get access to a desirable object, a female. Instead of baiting, they addressed courtship dances to the stick.

By 1970 more disturbing challenges to the behaviouristic view had appeared in many laboratory studies. The Pavlov’s idea that any perceptible cue could be taught, by classical conditioning, as a conditioned stimulus was dealt a severe blow by Garcia et al. (1972). They showed that rats can not associate visual and auditory cues with food that made them ill, even though they can associate olfactory cues with such food. On the other hand, experimenters found that quails can associate not auditory or olfactory cues but visual ones – colours - with dangerous foods. Later work by other investigators extended these results, showing, for example, that pigeons readily learn to associate sounds but not colours with danger and colours but not sounds with food. The obvious conclusion was that these animals are predisposed to make certain associations more easily in some situations than in others. The same kind of pattern was discovered in experiments in operant conditioning. Rats readily learn to press a bar for food, but they cannot learn to press a bar in order to avoid an electric shock. Similarly, pigeons easily learn to peck at a spot for a food reward but have great difficulty learning to hop on a treadle for food; they learn to avoid shock by hopping on a treadle but not by pecking. Once again it seems that in certain situations animals are innately prepared to learn some things more readily than others. The associations that are most easily learned have an adaptive logic. In the natural world odour is a more reliable indicator than colour for rats (which are notoriously nocturnal) trying to identify dangerous food; the colour of a seed is a more useful thing for a pigeon to remember than any sounds the seed makes. Similarly, a pigeon is more likely to learn how to eat novel seeds if it experiments with food with its beak rather than with its feet.

In sum, animals that have innate biases concerning which cues they rely on and which procedures they attempt are more likely to ignore spurious cues, and they will learn faster than animals without inherent biases. The idea that animals are innately programmed to attend to specific cues in specific behavioural contexts suggests a mutually reinforcing relation between learning and instinct (Gould and Marler, 1987). This relation helps to reconcile the approaches of behaviorists and ethologists and to establish a link between ecology and cognitive ethology.

21. A SCETCH ON INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOUR