首页
登录
职称英语
Animal BehaviorP1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American s
Animal BehaviorP1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American s
游客
2024-01-02
37
管理
问题
Animal Behavior
P1: Throughout much of the 20th century, European and American scientists were sharply divided over how to study animal behavior.
To ethologists who mainly based in Europe, the most striking fact about animal behaviors was that they are fixed and seemingly unchangeable. For example, cats have an innate need to climb and seek refuge up high. They typically feel most secure when they can view their world from a point of concealment and gain control over their environment from a single vantage point. Dogs, by contrast, are able to understand and communicate with humans. Ethologists came to believe that ultimately even the most complex animal behaviors could be broken down into a series of immutable stimulus-response reactions. They emphasized the value of comparative studies of specific behavioral patterns, such as mating across species, in order to gain insight into how those behaviors evolved. For well over half a century, their search for the innate mechanism continued.
P2: Meanwhile, to those ethologists who based mainly in North America, the study of animal behavior took a different tack. American comparative behaviorists focused on learning and conditioned responses, which later developed into comparative behaviorism. Of interest to comparative behaviorists was where a particular behavior came from—that is, its evolutionary history, how the nervous system controlled it, and the extent to which it could be modified. In 1894, C. Lloyd Morgan, a pioneer comparative behaviorist, insisted that animal behavior be explained independently without reference to emotions or motivations, since these could not be observed or measured. In Morgan’s research, animals were put in simple situations and presented with an easily described stimulus, accompanied by precise observations and vivid accounts of behavior.
P3: This extension of animal behaviorism— studies of stimulus-response—has evolved to become an important development in comparative behavior. A stimulus is an observable fact and a broad term—so broad, in fact, that it involves any phenomenon that directly influences the activity or growth of a living organism. Not all responses to stimuli are automatic, however: as we have noted, even humans are incapable of some automatic responses. Nor are environmental changes limited to the organism’s external environment. In some cases, its internal environment can act as a stimulus as well. In general, behavior can be categorized as either innate (inborn) or learned, but the distinction is often unclear. Behavior is considered innate when it is presented and completed without any experience whereby it was learned. Higher animals, in contrast to other animals, use both innate and learned behavior. Not surprisingly, comparative behaviorists worked most comfortably from the comfort of a laboratory or psychology department, while their ethologist colleagues tended to stick strictly to studying innate patterns in a natural environment, like the development of behavior throughout animals’ lives. Major disagreements between adherents of the two approaches out inevitably occur, though the distinctions were often unclear.
P4: To early ethologists, the major driving force in behavior was instinct, behaviors that are inherited and unchangeable. Moths move towards light because they inherit the mechanism to respond to light. Although dogs have more options available to them, they bark at strangers for much the same reason. The comparative behaviorists disagreed: learning and rewards are more important factors than instinct in animal behavior. Geese are not born with the ability to retrieve lost eggs when they roll out of the nest—they learn to do so. If their behavior sometimes seems silly to humans because it fails to take new conditions into account, that is because the animals’ ability to learn is limited. There were too many examples of behaviors modified by experience for comparative behaviorists to put their faith in learning and rewards.
P5: The arguments came to a peak in the 1950s and became known as "the nature vs. nurture controversy". Consider how differently an ethologist and a comparative behaviorist would interpret the begging behavior of a hatching bird. The first time a hatching bird is approached by its parents, it begs by pecking at the beaks of their parents in an attempt to stimulate them to regurgitate a meal. Obviously, said the ethologists, they inherited the ability and the tendency to beg. Not so, countered the comparative behaviorists. We also saw that a model bearing what would seem to be the most superficial resemblance to the beak of the parent birds would stimulate begging on the part of the chick. Later experiments showed that when presented with two parental birds from related species, the young initially showed no preference for either of them. Of course, these chicks will only ever be rewarded by their parents. It would appear therefore that their innate behavior is refined with time, or to put it another way—they learn. Eventually, the distinctions between the two fields narrowed.
P6: The current view is that both nature and nurture influence behavior and development.
Increasingly, people are beginning to realize that asking how much heredity or environment influence a particular trait is not the right approach. The reality is that there is not a simple way to disentangle the multitude of forces that exist. These influences include genetic factors that interact with one another, environmental factors that interact such as social experiences and overall culture, as well as how both hereditary and environmental influences intermingle. Instead, many researchers today are interested in seeing how genes modulate environmental influences and vice versa.
P4: ■ To early ethologists, the major driving force in behavior was instinct, behaviors that are inherited and unchangeable. ■ Moths move towards light because they inherit the mechanism to respond to light. Although dogs have more options available to them, they bark at strangers for much the same reason. ■ The comparative behaviorists disagreed: learning and rewards are more important factors than instinct in animal behavior. ■ Geese are not born with the ability to retrieve lost eggs when they roll out of the nest—they learn to do so. If their behavior sometimes seems silly to humans because it fails to take new conditions into account, that is because the animals’ ability to learn is limited. There were too many examples of behaviors modified by experience for comparative behaviorists to put their faith in learning and rewards. [br] Paragraph 3 suggests that comparative behaviorists’ conclusions concerning animal behavior were based
选项
A、on the observation that rewards do not affect inherited animal behavior.
B、on the application of stress to modify animal behavior.
C、most often on the results of laboratory experiments.
D、more on stimulus/response reactions than on simple rewards.
答案
C
解析
【推断题】倒数第2句提到“comparative behaviorists worked most comfortably in the laboratory or psychology department…”说明比较行为学家的研究以实验和心理研究为主,因此答案为C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3328643.html
相关试题推荐
Choosethecorrectletter,A,BorC.[br]IfAmericanhadanextradayper-week
Choosethecorrectletter,A,BorC.[br]IfAmericanshadanextradayperwee
Choosethecorrectletter,A,BorC.[br]Americanboysdropoutofschoolata
ENDANGEREDSPECIESAlthoughwecannotdoanythingabouttheplantsandanimalst
ENDANGEREDSPECIESAlthoughwecannotdoanythingabouttheplantsandanimalst
ENDANGEREDSPECIESAlthoughwecannotdoanythingabouttheplantsandanimalst
ENDANGEREDSPECIESAlthoughwecannotdoanythingabouttheplantsandanimalst
CITYARCHIVESAnineteenth-centurydocumentsBmapsCpersonalpapersDphotog
CITYARCHIVESAnineteenth-centurydocumentsBmapsCpersonalpapersDphotog
CITYARCHIVESAnineteenth-centurydocumentsBmapsCpersonalpapersDphotog
随机试题
Itmustalsodemonstratethatgreaterfreedomwillrisenewspaperqualityandma
ManyBrazilianscannotread.In12000,aquarterofthoseaged15andolder
【B1】[br]【B10】[originaltext]TheBookofPoemswasabookofthepoemsand
离心泵的最大安装高度与下列哪项因素有关?( )A.水泵的效率 B.泵的扬程
我国开放式基金注册登记体系的模式不包括()。A.“内置”模式 B.“外
三度房室传导阻滞伴阿-斯综合征的首选治疗是A.阿托品 B.异丙肾上腺素 C.
2015年1-10月,上海原煤产量约为( )万吨。A.1340 B.
从资产配置的角度看,投资组合保险策略是将全部资金投资于风险资产的一种动态调整策
下列关于宏观经济发展目标及其衡量指标的表述,错误的是()。A.衡量物价稳定的宏
背景资料 我国北方某受冻区海港,实测的高、低潮位累积频率关系如表1和2所列
最新回复
(
0
)