1 00:00:00,130 --> 00:00:01,850 The following content is provided 2 00:00:01,850 --> 00:00:04,090 under a Creative Commons license. 3 00:00:04,090 --> 00:00:06,940 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue 4 00:00:06,940 --> 00:00:10,800 to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:13,410 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,410 --> 00:00:17,289 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,289 --> 00:00:17,914 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:23,720 --> 00:00:28,330 PROFESSOR: All right, let's get started. 9 00:00:28,330 --> 00:00:37,920 I want to finish talking about Konrad Lorenz' jackdaws today, 10 00:00:37,920 --> 00:00:42,130 and maybe I hope to be able to start with the next topic, 11 00:00:42,130 --> 00:00:45,185 because at the beginning of the next hour 12 00:00:45,185 --> 00:00:47,850 we're going to watch a video, so we'll have less time 13 00:00:47,850 --> 00:00:51,150 to go over some of the questions. 14 00:00:54,090 --> 00:00:57,810 We just got started with this last time. 15 00:00:57,810 --> 00:01:00,740 The reading was from Konrad Lorenz' 16 00:01:00,740 --> 00:01:03,730 little book, called King Solomon's Ring, 17 00:01:03,730 --> 00:01:08,750 published a long time ago, but very interesting descriptions 18 00:01:08,750 --> 00:01:10,990 of his early studies of animals. 19 00:01:14,290 --> 00:01:17,850 Remember, jackdaws are a crow-lake corvid living 20 00:01:17,850 --> 00:01:19,460 in Europe. 21 00:01:19,460 --> 00:01:25,150 They nest in high places, not always on a cliff face, 22 00:01:25,150 --> 00:01:30,650 like the Kittiwake gull, but often high in trees, and often 23 00:01:30,650 --> 00:01:35,670 in the area where he studied them, they nest in rooftops. 24 00:01:35,670 --> 00:01:37,970 They often live near humans. 25 00:01:42,150 --> 00:01:45,470 He starts, remember, by talking about play. 26 00:01:45,470 --> 00:01:47,760 I introduced this last time. 27 00:01:51,140 --> 00:01:53,770 If anybody gets interested in play behavior, 28 00:01:53,770 --> 00:01:57,570 it would be interesting to look in the recent literature 29 00:01:57,570 --> 00:02:00,770 and see if there are any new studies of play that 30 00:02:00,770 --> 00:02:03,700 have something interesting to say. 31 00:02:03,700 --> 00:02:11,000 If you are interested in that and do some searches online, 32 00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:14,140 please go over it with me, and I can 33 00:02:14,140 --> 00:02:17,560 let you know whether part of that 34 00:02:17,560 --> 00:02:20,220 would be an interesting project report. 35 00:02:23,160 --> 00:02:27,960 What made jackdaws such interesting pets 36 00:02:27,960 --> 00:02:32,930 for this young man in Germany, Konrad Lorenz, who 37 00:02:32,930 --> 00:02:35,720 had liked animals since he was very young? 38 00:02:35,720 --> 00:02:44,215 He was just 22 in 1925 when he began studying these animals. 39 00:02:48,690 --> 00:02:54,040 What were the properties that make jackdaws interesting? 40 00:02:54,040 --> 00:02:56,600 Well for one thing, like other corvids, 41 00:02:56,600 --> 00:03:00,260 they're very intelligent animals. 42 00:03:00,260 --> 00:03:03,470 What makes dogs so interesting? 43 00:03:03,470 --> 00:03:05,330 Part of it is their intelligence. 44 00:03:05,330 --> 00:03:06,595 Dogs are very smart. 45 00:03:06,595 --> 00:03:11,000 They're probably as smart as chimpanzees-- 46 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:13,140 somewhat different types of intelligence. 47 00:03:13,140 --> 00:03:15,686 They're specialized in different ways--yes? 48 00:03:15,686 --> 00:03:17,090 AUDIENCE: Also they're faithful. 49 00:03:17,090 --> 00:03:21,400 They're loyal to their humans. 50 00:03:21,400 --> 00:03:24,330 PROFESSOR: Dogs are probably more faithful than jackdaws, 51 00:03:24,330 --> 00:03:28,450 but believe me if a jackdaw is attached, you're quite right. 52 00:03:28,450 --> 00:03:32,290 They will definitely stick close to one human being. 53 00:03:35,290 --> 00:03:38,290 Their attack behavior is a little more specialized. 54 00:03:38,290 --> 00:03:43,250 They can even attack their own owner, as you will see. 55 00:03:43,250 --> 00:03:44,142 Yes? 56 00:03:44,142 --> 00:03:46,070 AUDIENCE: I noticed that they imprinted 57 00:03:46,070 --> 00:03:49,039 on the human [INAUDIBLE]. 58 00:03:49,039 --> 00:03:51,080 PROFESSOR: Whenever there's a lot of other noise, 59 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:53,196 I can't understand anything. 60 00:03:53,196 --> 00:03:55,661 AUDIENCE: That it really imprinted on the human, 61 00:03:55,661 --> 00:03:58,126 and almost thought of itself as a human-- like when 62 00:03:58,126 --> 00:03:59,490 it would walk. 63 00:03:59,490 --> 00:04:02,130 PROFESSOR: That's part of their social nature. 64 00:04:02,130 --> 00:04:04,500 They're very social, like dogs. 65 00:04:04,500 --> 00:04:09,880 And like dogs, they can imprint on humans. 66 00:04:09,880 --> 00:04:14,230 A young dog, a puppy, as I mentioned last time, 67 00:04:14,230 --> 00:04:18,209 if they're socialized to humans very early, 68 00:04:18,209 --> 00:04:23,070 they treat humans as part of their pack. 69 00:04:23,070 --> 00:04:26,645 In fact, humans will be the alphas. 70 00:04:29,190 --> 00:04:32,590 The alpha male might be a female human, but the alpha male 71 00:04:32,590 --> 00:04:36,730 to a dog is the dominant animal in the pack. 72 00:04:36,730 --> 00:04:39,150 That's the way some dogs, some species, 73 00:04:39,150 --> 00:04:45,180 become much more centered on one owner, the master, 74 00:04:45,180 --> 00:04:46,820 than other dogs. 75 00:04:46,820 --> 00:04:51,490 Some dogs just simply become attached to the whole family. 76 00:04:51,490 --> 00:04:54,550 Even a dog that's very, very attached-- like 77 00:04:54,550 --> 00:05:01,000 say, a doberman-- to one master, they're still social animals. 78 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:05,280 They live in a larger pack, and they will defend the pack, 79 00:05:05,280 --> 00:05:10,370 so they are a pretty good guard dog in that respect. 80 00:05:10,370 --> 00:05:11,310 They're very social. 81 00:05:11,310 --> 00:05:14,050 They're very intelligent, and they 82 00:05:14,050 --> 00:05:16,090 are adapted to living near humans. 83 00:05:16,090 --> 00:05:18,840 They have been for a long time. 84 00:05:18,840 --> 00:05:22,070 In Altenburg, Germany, where Lorenz lived at that time, 85 00:05:22,070 --> 00:05:25,820 there was many jackdaws living in different rooftops 86 00:05:25,820 --> 00:05:26,505 in the town. 87 00:05:30,770 --> 00:05:36,210 This is a quote from Lorenz-- "like the stones of a mosaic, 88 00:05:36,210 --> 00:05:41,680 the inherited and acquired elements of a young bird's 89 00:05:41,680 --> 00:05:45,490 behavior are pieced together to produce a perfect pattern, 90 00:05:45,490 --> 00:05:50,680 but in a bird that's been reared by hand, 91 00:05:50,680 --> 00:05:52,840 the natural harmony of this design 92 00:05:52,840 --> 00:05:56,340 is necessarily somewhat disturbed." 93 00:05:56,340 --> 00:05:59,420 I suppose if you're interested in natural behavior of dogs, 94 00:05:59,420 --> 00:06:02,590 you could say a dog's behaviors is pretty disturbed by being 95 00:06:02,590 --> 00:06:04,700 raised by humans, too, so you don't 96 00:06:04,700 --> 00:06:08,490 see all the natural behaviors of a dog that's 97 00:06:08,490 --> 00:06:11,350 become a human pet. 98 00:06:11,350 --> 00:06:14,450 But it's more dramatic in the case of the birds, 99 00:06:14,450 --> 00:06:17,430 and Lorenz goes through this. 100 00:06:21,260 --> 00:06:24,580 The disturbances he talks about are all results 101 00:06:24,580 --> 00:06:31,310 of early learning, causing fixation on the wrong species. 102 00:06:31,310 --> 00:06:33,950 It's very interesting. 103 00:06:33,950 --> 00:06:36,070 We think of imprinting as a single thing, 104 00:06:36,070 --> 00:06:39,110 and when it was discovered with birds, 105 00:06:39,110 --> 00:06:44,200 as we'll see in the video, next class, where Lorenz discovered 106 00:06:44,200 --> 00:06:52,190 this in ducks, in the case of the jackdaws, 107 00:06:52,190 --> 00:06:55,470 he observed that it's not just related 108 00:06:55,470 --> 00:06:58,490 to fixating on a parent. 109 00:06:58,490 --> 00:07:01,020 They can be fixated for different functions 110 00:07:01,020 --> 00:07:01,935 on different animals. 111 00:07:05,690 --> 00:07:08,130 He wrote a pretty well-known paper-- at least 112 00:07:08,130 --> 00:07:12,140 it's well known in German-- "Der Kumpan in der Umwelt de Terre," 113 00:07:12,140 --> 00:07:16,990 but it's roughly translated Companionship in Bird Life. 114 00:07:19,730 --> 00:07:21,400 He describes many of these things 115 00:07:21,400 --> 00:07:25,040 in that scientific paper. 116 00:07:25,040 --> 00:07:27,630 For example, a bird that's imprinted 117 00:07:27,630 --> 00:07:31,300 on humans, when it reaches sexual maturity, 118 00:07:31,300 --> 00:07:36,480 may court only humans as potential mates. 119 00:07:36,480 --> 00:07:42,740 He describes jackdaws and the dramatic way 120 00:07:42,740 --> 00:07:45,470 these fixations are manifested. 121 00:07:45,470 --> 00:07:49,520 In fact, they can be imprinted on a particular human. 122 00:07:49,520 --> 00:07:55,080 One became fixated on a maid that worked for him, 123 00:07:55,080 --> 00:07:59,830 but then moved to another location-- left his household, 124 00:07:59,830 --> 00:08:03,520 and the bird eventually found her 125 00:08:03,520 --> 00:08:07,840 and tried to mate with her over there-- but only for mating. 126 00:08:07,840 --> 00:08:13,060 Then it would fly back, because it lived with Lorenz 127 00:08:13,060 --> 00:08:15,120 in an aviary attached to his house. 128 00:08:20,090 --> 00:08:22,495 Then he describes this jackdaw pet 129 00:08:22,495 --> 00:08:27,360 that he called Jacques-- turned out to be female actually-- 130 00:08:27,360 --> 00:08:29,770 courted only humans for mating. 131 00:08:29,770 --> 00:08:34,409 But when he wanted to fly, he was fixated on crows, 132 00:08:34,409 --> 00:08:36,919 because apparently when he first learned to fly, 133 00:08:36,919 --> 00:08:42,559 it was crows flying over that initiated his interest. 134 00:08:42,559 --> 00:08:43,980 He was just learning to fly. 135 00:08:43,980 --> 00:08:46,280 He flew with the crows. 136 00:08:46,280 --> 00:08:50,320 He had a lot of trouble getting Jacques to give up that habit, 137 00:08:50,320 --> 00:08:55,130 so he often would fly with the crows until he became lost. 138 00:08:57,850 --> 00:09:00,890 Sometimes Lorenz would go out and make 139 00:09:00,890 --> 00:09:04,735 jackdaw calls, trying to find Jacques, get him to come back. 140 00:09:12,800 --> 00:09:16,160 Why would we expect care of young, 141 00:09:16,160 --> 00:09:20,190 which we call brood tending in ethology to be largely 142 00:09:20,190 --> 00:09:22,125 innate in many animal species? 143 00:09:24,832 --> 00:09:26,480 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 144 00:09:26,480 --> 00:09:32,670 PROFESSOR: Like the species we study in the lab, 145 00:09:32,670 --> 00:09:35,920 you can take a hamster and breed them, 146 00:09:35,920 --> 00:09:45,120 and they can raise young though they've never 147 00:09:45,120 --> 00:09:47,270 grown up in families. 148 00:09:47,270 --> 00:09:51,610 They leave the mother after weaning and separate, 149 00:09:51,610 --> 00:09:53,820 so they don't live socially. 150 00:09:53,820 --> 00:09:54,700 They're solitary. 151 00:09:54,700 --> 00:09:56,650 They live in a solitary way, although they 152 00:09:56,650 --> 00:10:00,590 do live in proximity to other hamsters, 153 00:10:00,590 --> 00:10:03,910 from what we know about them. 154 00:10:03,910 --> 00:10:05,950 It's been difficult to study wild hamsters, 155 00:10:05,950 --> 00:10:07,720 because they live in Syria. 156 00:10:07,720 --> 00:10:10,010 As you know, Syria's been a difficult place 157 00:10:10,010 --> 00:10:16,470 for people from Europe or America to go to study animals. 158 00:10:16,470 --> 00:10:21,010 I had one student that went there 159 00:10:21,010 --> 00:10:23,160 when it was a little less dangerous, 160 00:10:23,160 --> 00:10:26,800 but it was difficult to get a visa, 161 00:10:26,800 --> 00:10:29,800 so he just went in from Lebanon and managed 162 00:10:29,800 --> 00:10:32,790 to interact with people there. 163 00:10:32,790 --> 00:10:35,570 He brought back a group of hamsters for the first time 164 00:10:35,570 --> 00:10:42,450 since the initial capture of hamsters in the 1930s. 165 00:10:42,450 --> 00:10:45,460 Why would it be expected to be innate, 166 00:10:45,460 --> 00:10:48,180 and how would you look for learned components 167 00:10:48,180 --> 00:10:48,850 of the behavior? 168 00:10:52,150 --> 00:10:57,150 Why would it almost have to be innate in many species? 169 00:10:57,150 --> 00:11:02,110 Because once they mate, they're going to have the babies. 170 00:11:02,110 --> 00:11:05,618 If they don't know how to take care of them, 171 00:11:05,618 --> 00:11:09,810 if they don't have instinctive ability to take care of them, 172 00:11:09,810 --> 00:11:13,600 the babies are not going to survive. 173 00:11:13,600 --> 00:11:16,010 Their reproduction will be unsuccessful. 174 00:11:16,010 --> 00:11:20,506 So they have evolved to be able to take care of them 175 00:11:20,506 --> 00:11:23,390 on the first try, but it doesn't mean they don't learn anything. 176 00:11:27,810 --> 00:11:31,790 So what do you look for? 177 00:11:31,790 --> 00:11:37,160 Some of you are in labs where you're studying mice or rats. 178 00:11:37,160 --> 00:11:41,370 I don't think there's any hamsters now, 179 00:11:41,370 --> 00:11:43,440 because I don't keep the hamsters anymore. 180 00:11:43,440 --> 00:11:50,620 But for years I had them, and it was very evident to me 181 00:11:50,620 --> 00:11:53,780 that things were being learned. 182 00:11:53,780 --> 00:11:57,220 I can tell you several things. 183 00:11:57,220 --> 00:12:01,050 One is I would notice that first litters, 184 00:12:01,050 --> 00:12:07,640 I would discover injured pups much more frequently. 185 00:12:07,640 --> 00:12:12,430 They were handled more roughly by the mother. 186 00:12:12,430 --> 00:12:19,350 If I would separate the mother from the nest-- 187 00:12:19,350 --> 00:12:23,230 and sometimes I did that because of experiments I was conducting 188 00:12:23,230 --> 00:12:28,080 and then put the mother back-- an inexperienced mother-- if it 189 00:12:28,080 --> 00:12:30,300 was her first litter-- would be much more 190 00:12:30,300 --> 00:12:34,310 likely to lose her maternal mood altogether. 191 00:12:34,310 --> 00:12:36,530 She would treat her pups like they were insects, 192 00:12:36,530 --> 00:12:38,836 and she would attack them. 193 00:12:38,836 --> 00:12:40,460 Sometimes that would be brief, and then 194 00:12:40,460 --> 00:12:45,310 she would recover her maternal mood and go back, 195 00:12:45,310 --> 00:12:49,870 but that almost never happened in second and third litters. 196 00:12:49,870 --> 00:12:52,495 Hamsters are capable of having multiple litters. 197 00:12:52,495 --> 00:12:55,770 They're very prolific in their reproduction. 198 00:12:55,770 --> 00:12:59,652 Let's see what else I wrote here. 199 00:12:59,652 --> 00:13:01,360 They of course, have to be able to do it, 200 00:13:01,360 --> 00:13:03,880 because the first time they're exposed to young 201 00:13:03,880 --> 00:13:05,300 is when they start having them. 202 00:13:11,090 --> 00:13:14,010 It's not completely innate in many animals, 203 00:13:14,010 --> 00:13:17,300 especially primates were more is learned. 204 00:13:17,300 --> 00:13:22,080 It's not that humans don't have brood-tending instincts, 205 00:13:22,080 --> 00:13:27,230 but abnormalities are much more likely in the higher animals, 206 00:13:27,230 --> 00:13:32,860 because so much more is learned, and some of that learning 207 00:13:32,860 --> 00:13:36,140 can not be beneficial for brood tending. 208 00:13:44,090 --> 00:13:49,160 Any individual variations you can see among-- let's say 209 00:13:49,160 --> 00:13:54,980 you have a litter of animals, and you study all the females? 210 00:13:57,950 --> 00:14:02,300 You get them to mate, and they all have litters. 211 00:14:02,300 --> 00:14:07,120 You will pretty soon see individual differences 212 00:14:07,120 --> 00:14:08,430 appearing. 213 00:14:08,430 --> 00:14:11,360 You have to be sharp to notice them, 214 00:14:11,360 --> 00:14:13,200 but there will be individual differences 215 00:14:13,200 --> 00:14:17,680 because there are-- even though genetically 216 00:14:17,680 --> 00:14:20,510 they're very uniform, hamsters more than just 217 00:14:20,510 --> 00:14:24,775 about any other laboratory animal. 218 00:14:24,775 --> 00:14:26,650 One reason they're a good experimental animal 219 00:14:26,650 --> 00:14:30,000 is because of that genetic uniformity. 220 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:36,440 They all arose from, I believe, a single male and two females 221 00:14:36,440 --> 00:14:41,720 who were captured near Aleppo, Syria, 222 00:14:41,720 --> 00:14:46,740 by an Israeli scientist named Aharoni, 223 00:14:46,740 --> 00:14:52,760 and he introduced them for laboratory work, 224 00:14:52,760 --> 00:14:55,120 and they spread to other countries, including America. 225 00:15:01,850 --> 00:15:04,760 Let's talk about a different kind of learning. 226 00:15:04,760 --> 00:15:07,420 How do young jackdaws come to recognize predators? 227 00:15:09,995 --> 00:15:14,910 The very interesting interaction between innate components 228 00:15:14,910 --> 00:15:20,440 and learned components-- and Lorenz 229 00:15:20,440 --> 00:15:29,960 described his experience with an innate reaction of jackdaws. 230 00:15:32,630 --> 00:15:34,150 You should know that story. 231 00:15:34,150 --> 00:15:35,510 I give the pages, there. 232 00:15:40,030 --> 00:15:45,180 Certain stimuli that could cause the jackdaws 233 00:15:45,180 --> 00:15:48,350 in the vicinity to attack him. 234 00:15:48,350 --> 00:15:52,920 What was he doing that caused the jackdaws he was rearing-- 235 00:15:52,920 --> 00:15:55,560 so they were very familiar with him-- 236 00:15:55,560 --> 00:15:58,482 to start treating him like an enemy? 237 00:15:58,482 --> 00:16:01,428 AUDIENCE: He would hold the young chicks, 238 00:16:01,428 --> 00:16:05,850 and the chick had a very dark, black object, really-- 239 00:16:05,850 --> 00:16:07,490 PROFESSOR: Yeah, didn't even have 240 00:16:07,490 --> 00:16:09,490 to be a jackdaw-like object. 241 00:16:09,490 --> 00:16:11,850 He could be holding anything black, 242 00:16:11,850 --> 00:16:14,650 especially if it was dangling, you know, 243 00:16:14,650 --> 00:16:18,270 like a hunter carrying a dead bird. 244 00:16:18,270 --> 00:16:21,460 Remember, he said one time he just 245 00:16:21,460 --> 00:16:23,840 was removing a roll of film-- of course, 246 00:16:23,840 --> 00:16:27,090 the film was in a black reel, and it looks dark 247 00:16:27,090 --> 00:16:29,350 when it comes out of the camera. 248 00:16:29,350 --> 00:16:34,086 He was removing film from a camera. 249 00:16:34,086 --> 00:16:35,710 Apparently, it had been exposed, and he 250 00:16:35,710 --> 00:16:38,480 was going to get rid of it, put new film in. 251 00:16:38,480 --> 00:16:40,690 And of course, he unraveled it, and there's 252 00:16:40,690 --> 00:16:43,490 that dangling thing, and immediately he 253 00:16:43,490 --> 00:16:47,460 was attacked by jackdaws, because they 254 00:16:47,460 --> 00:16:52,020 have an innate reaction that's in response to what we call 255 00:16:52,020 --> 00:16:57,330 key stimuli-- very simple stimuli, usually are all that's 256 00:16:57,330 --> 00:17:00,970 necessary to elicit fixed action patterns. 257 00:17:00,970 --> 00:17:06,940 It's not that these key stimuli can't change over time, 258 00:17:06,940 --> 00:17:12,400 but initially the stimuli are very, very simple. 259 00:17:12,400 --> 00:17:16,470 Over time some animals do learn, and more complex stimuli 260 00:17:16,470 --> 00:17:22,060 come to elicit the behavior, but with jackdaws, 261 00:17:22,060 --> 00:17:30,060 any dark, dangling object will elicit the stimulus. 262 00:17:30,060 --> 00:17:33,310 Now how does learning enter this? 263 00:17:36,530 --> 00:17:37,530 What do they learn? 264 00:17:37,530 --> 00:17:38,220 Somebody else. 265 00:17:41,550 --> 00:17:42,474 Yes? 266 00:17:42,474 --> 00:17:47,280 AUDIENCE: They also have sort of a call that 267 00:17:47,280 --> 00:17:50,079 designates when one of the members of the group 268 00:17:50,079 --> 00:17:51,620 sees something that it has previously 269 00:17:51,620 --> 00:17:57,370 identified as being vicious of a threat to the population. 270 00:17:57,370 --> 00:17:59,845 So other crows, when they hear the sound, 271 00:17:59,845 --> 00:18:02,222 they realize that that sound is the sound that 272 00:18:02,222 --> 00:18:03,805 designates the presence of a predator, 273 00:18:03,805 --> 00:18:06,310 even if they haven't witnessed the predator actually. 274 00:18:06,310 --> 00:18:07,310 PROFESSOR: That's right. 275 00:18:07,310 --> 00:18:10,630 They start calling-- this zik-zik-zik-zik-zik-- 276 00:18:10,630 --> 00:18:15,890 a very raspy kind of sound that jackdaws make that indicates 277 00:18:15,890 --> 00:18:18,170 there's danger. 278 00:18:18,170 --> 00:18:22,860 But why would they do that? 279 00:18:22,860 --> 00:18:26,280 Humans aren't dangerous to them. 280 00:18:26,280 --> 00:18:30,440 It's because once you do something like that, 281 00:18:30,440 --> 00:18:34,840 and you elicit that innate reaction, 282 00:18:34,840 --> 00:18:38,900 it causes the animal to emit that cry, 283 00:18:38,900 --> 00:18:45,140 and he actually learns the face of the human. 284 00:18:45,140 --> 00:18:48,120 He doesn't react to all humans that way. 285 00:18:48,120 --> 00:18:54,000 He reacts to the specific human that did that. 286 00:18:54,000 --> 00:18:59,050 They become quote "enemies of jackdaws." 287 00:18:59,050 --> 00:19:01,860 There are studies done more recently 288 00:19:01,860 --> 00:19:06,220 based on the early Lorenz studies of crows. 289 00:19:06,220 --> 00:19:08,670 For example, it started in Japan, 290 00:19:08,670 --> 00:19:12,240 some very interesting studies of crow behavior-- 291 00:19:12,240 --> 00:19:16,020 not just cognitive behavior, but innate reactions as well. 292 00:19:16,020 --> 00:19:19,300 But the studies done in the US-- and I 293 00:19:19,300 --> 00:19:24,360 believe it's been done in other countries, too-- investigated 294 00:19:24,360 --> 00:19:24,860 this. 295 00:19:24,860 --> 00:19:28,400 They would elicit that reaction. 296 00:19:28,400 --> 00:19:32,100 But they were wearing masks, and the animal 297 00:19:32,100 --> 00:19:39,440 learned to recognize that mask and would treat that person 298 00:19:39,440 --> 00:19:42,700 like an enemy if he was wearing that mask. 299 00:19:42,700 --> 00:19:44,560 They were able to show that it was 300 00:19:44,560 --> 00:19:46,810 very dependent on the specific stimuli. 301 00:19:46,810 --> 00:19:49,980 It could even be a different person, but wearing that mask, 302 00:19:49,980 --> 00:19:53,450 they were an enemy of crows. 303 00:19:53,450 --> 00:19:55,650 The reason they did that experiment 304 00:19:55,650 --> 00:19:57,500 was a very interesting one. 305 00:19:57,500 --> 00:20:02,580 They wanted to see could that crow-- and I don't 306 00:20:02,580 --> 00:20:04,580 know if this has been done with jackdaws, 307 00:20:04,580 --> 00:20:08,605 but they're very similar birds, both corvids, 308 00:20:08,605 --> 00:20:13,030 both very intelligent, and both have very good memories-- 309 00:20:13,030 --> 00:20:18,760 they wanted to see could that knowledge of an enemy of crows 310 00:20:18,760 --> 00:20:20,620 be passed on to their offspring. 311 00:20:25,100 --> 00:20:29,940 They carefully followed these animals 312 00:20:29,940 --> 00:20:35,220 with no more exposure to that mask 313 00:20:35,220 --> 00:20:40,290 until the young were old enough to fly and to make 314 00:20:40,290 --> 00:20:45,970 these sounds that would indicate the recognizing an enemy. 315 00:20:45,970 --> 00:20:50,620 Then they started using the mask again 316 00:20:50,620 --> 00:20:53,300 when no adults were around. 317 00:20:53,300 --> 00:20:58,320 They already knew that if the young heard an adult making 318 00:20:58,320 --> 00:21:02,180 that sound, responding-- and of course, they actually 319 00:21:02,180 --> 00:21:04,160 are sensitive to eye direction, they 320 00:21:04,160 --> 00:21:07,260 will see who the jackdaw was looking at-- 321 00:21:07,260 --> 00:21:10,050 and the young will learn from the adults. 322 00:21:10,050 --> 00:21:12,830 But in this case, they waited until only 323 00:21:12,830 --> 00:21:13,945 the young were around. 324 00:21:21,600 --> 00:21:24,340 They found that if that young had 325 00:21:24,340 --> 00:21:28,490 lived with the adult a sufficient amount of time-- 326 00:21:28,490 --> 00:21:35,430 obviously, they didn't even know when the adult had responded 327 00:21:35,430 --> 00:21:38,890 to the mask-- but if the young was around, 328 00:21:38,890 --> 00:21:45,150 could learn from the adult that just the visual shape indicated 329 00:21:45,150 --> 00:21:46,660 an enemy. 330 00:21:46,660 --> 00:21:49,980 Obviously they had to be exposed in order to learn, 331 00:21:49,980 --> 00:21:53,630 but they didn't have to be experience the stimulus itself. 332 00:21:53,630 --> 00:21:56,540 They never had to see the black, dangling object. 333 00:21:56,540 --> 00:22:01,830 They only had to hear their parent, and they could learn. 334 00:22:01,830 --> 00:22:04,370 So traditions could develop then in a group. 335 00:22:04,370 --> 00:22:06,800 It's dangerous to do that around jackdaws. 336 00:22:06,800 --> 00:22:09,460 You can become an enemy of jackdaws for a long time. 337 00:22:18,050 --> 00:22:20,840 This is an animal, the Golden Eagle, 338 00:22:20,840 --> 00:22:27,015 that are enemies of jackdaws, real enemies of jackdaws. 339 00:22:31,860 --> 00:22:34,200 Many birds do have innate responses 340 00:22:34,200 --> 00:22:38,570 to certain kinds of flight patterns. 341 00:22:38,570 --> 00:22:42,360 The Golden Eagle flight pattern is one of those 342 00:22:42,360 --> 00:22:45,700 that, with a certain characteristic of their flight, 343 00:22:45,700 --> 00:22:49,300 that will elicit escape reactions of various sorts 344 00:22:49,300 --> 00:22:52,410 and these cries from various birds. 345 00:22:57,430 --> 00:23:02,560 Now what about can they learn to recognize individuals? 346 00:23:02,560 --> 00:23:04,980 We already mentioned that they could recognize 347 00:23:04,980 --> 00:23:07,810 individual humans, because they can 348 00:23:07,810 --> 00:23:11,540 recognize an individual human, one particular type of human, 349 00:23:11,540 --> 00:23:17,020 or a particular mask as an enemy of jackdaws, 350 00:23:17,020 --> 00:23:19,910 but what about other jackdaws? 351 00:23:19,910 --> 00:23:24,120 What is the evidence-- and it's of several sorts, 352 00:23:24,120 --> 00:23:27,320 if you study jackdaw social behavior-- what 353 00:23:27,320 --> 00:23:29,620 was the evidence that Lorenz presents 354 00:23:29,620 --> 00:23:34,760 that shows that they can recognize each other? 355 00:23:34,760 --> 00:23:37,700 Unless you really keep jackdaws, and you're observing them 356 00:23:37,700 --> 00:23:39,950 all the time, they all look pretty similar to you. 357 00:23:44,690 --> 00:23:46,970 But they start looking different when 358 00:23:46,970 --> 00:23:49,360 you're very, very familiar with them. 359 00:23:49,360 --> 00:23:50,750 Remember, in the Kittiwake gulls, 360 00:23:50,750 --> 00:23:54,500 they had to pay attention to the details of their wing patterns 361 00:23:54,500 --> 00:23:56,530 in order to be able to tell them apart. 362 00:23:56,530 --> 00:23:59,340 Jackdaws don't have patterns like that, 363 00:23:59,340 --> 00:24:02,670 but they're a little bit different in how heavy they 364 00:24:02,670 --> 00:24:06,520 are, the way they fluff their feathers, in their weight, 365 00:24:06,520 --> 00:24:09,620 the sheen of their feathers, and they're 366 00:24:09,620 --> 00:24:12,240 different in their behavior. 367 00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:13,855 All those things can lead to cues 368 00:24:13,855 --> 00:24:15,710 that someone watching them all the time 369 00:24:15,710 --> 00:24:17,320 can learn to recognize. 370 00:24:17,320 --> 00:24:19,080 Hamsters are similar-- very, very 371 00:24:19,080 --> 00:24:22,010 difficult to tell them apart. 372 00:24:22,010 --> 00:24:24,180 It's mainly, in fact, unless they're 373 00:24:24,180 --> 00:24:28,680 very different in weight-- you can recognize the sexes very 374 00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:30,760 easily. 375 00:24:30,760 --> 00:24:34,640 Otherwise, it's just in the behavioral pattern 376 00:24:34,640 --> 00:24:36,290 you learn to tell the difference. 377 00:24:39,730 --> 00:24:44,400 So how do we know jackdaws can recognize, much more 378 00:24:44,400 --> 00:24:47,150 quickly than humans, in fact, individual jackdaws? 379 00:24:50,011 --> 00:24:51,010 What would you look for? 380 00:24:56,290 --> 00:24:57,142 Yes, in the back? 381 00:24:57,142 --> 00:24:59,350 AUDIENCE: There's an established pecking order, which 382 00:24:59,350 --> 00:25:02,710 means that in order to feed, somebody at the top would-- 383 00:25:02,710 --> 00:25:05,690 PROFESSOR: Yeah, social dominance rank, exactly. 384 00:25:05,690 --> 00:25:10,220 We call it the pecking order, as you said. 385 00:25:10,220 --> 00:25:14,000 They can consistently recognize who's 386 00:25:14,000 --> 00:25:16,100 at the bottom, who's in the middle. 387 00:25:16,100 --> 00:25:20,660 They recognize their rank with respect to other animals. 388 00:25:20,660 --> 00:25:25,020 They know where they are in that pecking order. 389 00:25:25,020 --> 00:25:28,330 They know who the dominant jackdaw is. 390 00:25:28,330 --> 00:25:29,640 They know the relative rank. 391 00:25:29,640 --> 00:25:32,180 They know who his mate is. 392 00:25:32,180 --> 00:25:34,770 Generally the female-- it's almost always a male, 393 00:25:34,770 --> 00:25:37,930 but not always, but let's say it's a male-- then that female, 394 00:25:37,930 --> 00:25:40,040 once she becomes the mate to that male, 395 00:25:40,040 --> 00:25:43,300 she's going to have the high rank, too. 396 00:25:43,300 --> 00:25:46,059 They all learn that very quickly. 397 00:25:46,059 --> 00:25:47,100 They know where they fit. 398 00:25:50,400 --> 00:25:53,800 Another way of course, is when they 399 00:25:53,800 --> 00:25:57,510 mate, they recognize their mate. 400 00:26:07,810 --> 00:26:10,880 Of course, they do recognize friends and enemies. 401 00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:13,830 I put enemies in quotes here, because if there's 402 00:26:13,830 --> 00:26:17,190 any real enemy, then all the jackdaws are friends, 403 00:26:17,190 --> 00:26:19,260 and they support each other. 404 00:26:19,260 --> 00:26:21,380 But otherwise in normal social behaviors, 405 00:26:21,380 --> 00:26:24,040 they're more friendly with some birds than others, 406 00:26:24,040 --> 00:26:26,550 and this is consistent. 407 00:26:26,550 --> 00:26:31,160 It's obvious that they can recognize each other. 408 00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:34,650 How do mammals do it? 409 00:26:34,650 --> 00:26:39,460 Well certainly for the very visual animals, the primates 410 00:26:39,460 --> 00:26:44,190 and other very visual animals like giraffes, as an example, 411 00:26:44,190 --> 00:26:49,350 they also use visual cues to recognize individuals. 412 00:26:49,350 --> 00:26:53,260 But in most mammals, especially nocturnal mammals, 413 00:26:53,260 --> 00:26:55,510 olfaction is much more important, 414 00:26:55,510 --> 00:26:59,890 and they recognize individual odor patterns. 415 00:26:59,890 --> 00:27:06,170 Even animals like dogs-- different breeds of dogs 416 00:27:06,170 --> 00:27:09,107 look very different to us-- but to dogs, 417 00:27:09,107 --> 00:27:10,565 their smell is even more important. 418 00:27:28,860 --> 00:27:33,925 There's been more formal studies of some of that in crows. 419 00:27:37,090 --> 00:27:41,720 A lot of things that Lorenz observed and gave 420 00:27:41,720 --> 00:27:45,300 detailed observations about-- he did do simple experiments 421 00:27:45,300 --> 00:27:48,280 with his jackdaws-- but a lot of those 422 00:27:48,280 --> 00:27:50,880 have been followed up-- not so much with jackdaws, 423 00:27:50,880 --> 00:27:54,040 but with other corvids in experimental work-- 424 00:27:54,040 --> 00:27:56,590 and most of Lawrence's observations 425 00:27:56,590 --> 00:27:57,690 have been supported. 426 00:28:01,090 --> 00:28:03,000 In this question, I'm just pointing out 427 00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:06,700 that the male jackdaw lacks the plumage 428 00:28:06,700 --> 00:28:09,110 of a peacock for displaying towards a female. 429 00:28:12,180 --> 00:28:16,330 Then how does the young jackdaw who 430 00:28:16,330 --> 00:28:19,340 gets attracted-- he falls in love with a female jackdaw-- 431 00:28:19,340 --> 00:28:24,400 how does he get her attention and try 432 00:28:24,400 --> 00:28:27,560 to get a positive response? 433 00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:29,200 It must be through his behavior, right? 434 00:28:40,670 --> 00:28:46,920 He has a specific ceremony for calling a female to his nest. 435 00:28:46,920 --> 00:28:53,690 It has auditory components, or the way he calls, 436 00:28:53,690 --> 00:28:57,390 and it also has visual components. 437 00:28:57,390 --> 00:29:01,040 These do elicit response in other animals 438 00:29:01,040 --> 00:29:04,910 if they decide to attend to him. 439 00:29:04,910 --> 00:29:10,180 If a female is interested in finding a mate too, 440 00:29:10,180 --> 00:29:14,370 she will attend more to some males than others. 441 00:29:14,370 --> 00:29:16,850 When she attends, then she will begin 442 00:29:16,850 --> 00:29:18,140 to respond to these stimuli. 443 00:29:22,410 --> 00:29:25,960 He points out that he noticed sex differences 444 00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:31,220 in eye direction, very reminiscent of human behavior. 445 00:29:31,220 --> 00:29:37,120 For example, what we call coyness in humans-- 446 00:29:37,120 --> 00:29:40,020 they attend to, but they don't stare directly 447 00:29:40,020 --> 00:29:42,070 at a potential mate. 448 00:29:42,070 --> 00:29:45,310 This is the female responding to the male. 449 00:29:45,310 --> 00:29:46,940 She doesn't look directly at him. 450 00:29:46,940 --> 00:29:49,520 He might be staring at her, but she doesn't look directly, 451 00:29:49,520 --> 00:29:51,680 but she's also really attending to him. 452 00:29:55,210 --> 00:29:59,770 This can go on for quite a long time. 453 00:29:59,770 --> 00:30:04,340 How do you tell when a bird is looking or not looking? 454 00:30:04,340 --> 00:30:07,980 Unless they're owls, they've got laterally-placed eyes, 455 00:30:07,980 --> 00:30:11,130 so they could seem to be facing over here, 456 00:30:11,130 --> 00:30:12,920 but they could still be looking over here. 457 00:30:12,920 --> 00:30:17,150 Because their eyes are dark, you can't actually see the pupil. 458 00:30:17,150 --> 00:30:19,470 The jackdaws are amazing in their ability 459 00:30:19,470 --> 00:30:24,070 to tell what the bird is actually attending to, 460 00:30:24,070 --> 00:30:26,980 because the male won't struggle forever 461 00:30:26,980 --> 00:30:28,560 to gain the attention of the female 462 00:30:28,560 --> 00:30:30,710 if she is totally ignoring him. 463 00:30:30,710 --> 00:30:33,850 In fact, she'll eventually just fly away. 464 00:30:33,850 --> 00:30:35,960 But if she is interested, she won't fly away, 465 00:30:35,960 --> 00:30:41,410 but she won't directly respond for a long time. 466 00:30:41,410 --> 00:30:46,290 How does she respond if she is really interested? 467 00:30:46,290 --> 00:30:51,820 How does she get engaged to that male? 468 00:30:51,820 --> 00:30:54,150 Lorenz points out that it happens a full year 469 00:30:54,150 --> 00:30:57,830 before they actually start mating. 470 00:30:57,830 --> 00:31:02,260 So unlike many species, these animals 471 00:31:02,260 --> 00:31:06,470 have this betrothal ceremony a year 472 00:31:06,470 --> 00:31:08,570 before they actually start mating. 473 00:31:13,170 --> 00:31:19,200 What she does is engage in this ritual mating invitation. 474 00:31:19,200 --> 00:31:21,750 It's a particular posture. 475 00:31:21,750 --> 00:31:26,030 They crouch down, fluff their feathers in a certain way, 476 00:31:26,030 --> 00:31:28,670 widen their wings a little bit. 477 00:31:28,670 --> 00:31:33,740 It's used throughout life, later as a greeting ceremony, 478 00:31:33,740 --> 00:31:36,880 in a pair of jackdaws. 479 00:31:36,880 --> 00:31:40,780 Lorenz has some nice drawings of that in the book. 480 00:31:40,780 --> 00:31:43,910 This is a typical posturing that animals 481 00:31:43,910 --> 00:31:46,660 do that has a specific communication function. 482 00:31:53,250 --> 00:32:00,940 Once they are betrothed, even before they've started to mate, 483 00:32:00,940 --> 00:32:07,710 Lorenz describes two behaviors that occur frequently 484 00:32:07,710 --> 00:32:09,350 in a pair of jackdaws. 485 00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:18,010 And when they pair, how long does it last? 486 00:32:18,010 --> 00:32:22,400 Many animals will mate with only one animal in a season, 487 00:32:22,400 --> 00:32:26,500 but the next season, there's no preference 488 00:32:26,500 --> 00:32:29,150 for the original mate. 489 00:32:29,150 --> 00:32:31,470 But other animals, it's very different. 490 00:32:31,470 --> 00:32:34,530 Some animals are promiscuous even within the mating season. 491 00:32:34,530 --> 00:32:37,860 They'll mate with many different animals. 492 00:32:37,860 --> 00:32:40,380 What is it for jackdaws? 493 00:32:40,380 --> 00:32:42,330 They're monogamous, generally. 494 00:32:42,330 --> 00:32:44,300 They mate for life. 495 00:32:44,300 --> 00:32:45,675 Once they mate, that's it. 496 00:32:49,810 --> 00:32:57,570 That early posturing and the displays they show 497 00:32:57,570 --> 00:33:02,800 can result in a lifetime of companionship 498 00:33:02,800 --> 00:33:07,570 that, in jackdaws, which are very long-lived birds, 499 00:33:07,570 --> 00:33:10,740 can last for 20 years. 500 00:33:16,800 --> 00:33:21,230 Because of this, you could say they're 501 00:33:21,230 --> 00:33:23,650 married when they start mating, but their engagement 502 00:33:23,650 --> 00:33:27,370 is a full year beforehand, if we use the human terms. 503 00:33:27,370 --> 00:33:29,660 Lorenz uses the human terms pretty freely, 504 00:33:29,660 --> 00:33:32,490 because it's pretty obvious he's talking about the birds 505 00:33:32,490 --> 00:33:35,140 when he's talking about them. 506 00:33:35,140 --> 00:33:37,490 These are the two behaviors then. 507 00:33:37,490 --> 00:33:40,960 When these occur, then you know that that pair has formed. 508 00:33:45,180 --> 00:33:52,230 The male will feed the female, and the female will preen 509 00:33:52,230 --> 00:33:57,760 the feathers of the male, particularly in the areas 510 00:33:57,760 --> 00:34:00,680 of his neck and head that he cannot reach himself. 511 00:34:03,330 --> 00:34:05,630 They also make these sounds that you 512 00:34:05,630 --> 00:34:07,880 don't hear, except in this situation 513 00:34:07,880 --> 00:34:09,259 and in infant jackdaws. 514 00:34:11,770 --> 00:34:15,540 It's very common in many different species for courtship 515 00:34:15,540 --> 00:34:20,027 to involve these more infantile behaviors. 516 00:34:20,027 --> 00:34:21,094 It occurs in humans. 517 00:34:27,880 --> 00:34:32,015 He describes some of that behavior in more detail. 518 00:34:35,310 --> 00:34:39,480 Here's the female getting fed by the male. 519 00:34:43,300 --> 00:34:48,639 Literally he's poked some-- or has already finished perhaps 520 00:34:48,639 --> 00:34:52,530 putting an insect in her mouth. 521 00:34:52,530 --> 00:34:56,070 This is very common behavior during a courtship period, 522 00:34:56,070 --> 00:34:59,400 but it can occur later, too, throughout their lives. 523 00:35:02,980 --> 00:35:06,260 Jackdaws are very social, and they form close-knit groups, 524 00:35:06,260 --> 00:35:08,660 but it doesn't mean they don't squabble. 525 00:35:08,660 --> 00:35:12,290 You get conflicts over nest sites, 526 00:35:12,290 --> 00:35:14,410 for example, just like the Kittiwakes. 527 00:35:17,260 --> 00:35:20,270 Some nest sites are a lot more conveniently placed 528 00:35:20,270 --> 00:35:22,380 than others, so they will fight to get them. 529 00:35:25,970 --> 00:35:31,510 Each male has to establish the nest and nest site 530 00:35:31,510 --> 00:35:34,750 and attract his female to it. 531 00:35:37,720 --> 00:35:40,920 The conflicts are often settled by the kinds 532 00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:47,570 of postures-- displays, aggressive displays they make. 533 00:35:47,570 --> 00:35:50,640 Similarly, there are defensive displays 534 00:35:50,640 --> 00:35:55,775 that will stop the aggressiveness of the attacker. 535 00:36:00,200 --> 00:36:02,600 They will do this, the nest site, 536 00:36:02,600 --> 00:36:07,890 and when they engage in this very loud calling, 537 00:36:07,890 --> 00:36:11,600 it's apparently in one season of the year, which 538 00:36:11,600 --> 00:36:15,620 in Altenberg, Germany, is February and March. 539 00:36:15,620 --> 00:36:22,890 The whole town is filled with this loud-- zik-zik-ziking 540 00:36:22,890 --> 00:36:23,716 of the jackdaws. 541 00:36:26,320 --> 00:36:32,680 So what happens if the defending jackdaws actually attack. 542 00:36:32,680 --> 00:36:36,370 And that does happen, where a jackdaw 543 00:36:36,370 --> 00:36:40,040 stops just his aggressive posturing and decides-- hey, 544 00:36:40,040 --> 00:36:43,020 I've got a real chance to get this nest site 545 00:36:43,020 --> 00:36:44,580 and he attacks the bird. 546 00:36:44,580 --> 00:36:47,950 He perceives him as weaker. 547 00:36:47,950 --> 00:36:49,250 What happens? 548 00:36:49,250 --> 00:36:50,110 Yeah. 549 00:36:50,110 --> 00:36:52,170 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 550 00:36:52,170 --> 00:36:53,220 PROFESSOR: Sorry, louder. 551 00:36:53,220 --> 00:36:54,136 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 552 00:36:58,560 --> 00:37:04,930 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it actually results in a melee. 553 00:37:04,930 --> 00:37:06,990 It gets all the birds involved. 554 00:37:06,990 --> 00:37:08,530 They all start this. 555 00:37:13,560 --> 00:37:17,370 The zik-zik sounds become louder, 556 00:37:17,370 --> 00:37:19,680 and pretty soon there's a whole congregation 557 00:37:19,680 --> 00:37:21,910 of animals making this noise. 558 00:37:21,910 --> 00:37:24,850 And pretty soon, it gets so confusing that even the animal 559 00:37:24,850 --> 00:37:29,910 that was initially attacking or defending, 560 00:37:29,910 --> 00:37:31,970 they'll all start doing it. 561 00:37:31,970 --> 00:37:34,970 It's totally confusing. 562 00:37:34,970 --> 00:37:37,800 Even the guy who started it, he's joining that crowd, 563 00:37:37,800 --> 00:37:43,730 and pretty soon it all just gradually goes back to normal, 564 00:37:43,730 --> 00:37:47,120 and they all become un-aggressive again. 565 00:37:47,120 --> 00:37:51,260 They've got this built-in social behavior that protects them 566 00:37:51,260 --> 00:37:55,280 from too much damage by actual social attacks. 567 00:37:55,280 --> 00:37:58,770 Many species have this. 568 00:37:58,770 --> 00:38:00,940 Humans have it, too. 569 00:38:00,940 --> 00:38:04,300 We ruined it by developing weapons. 570 00:38:04,300 --> 00:38:06,510 Then we don't have to face somebody. 571 00:38:06,510 --> 00:38:11,890 We can kill them at a distance-- terrible thing. 572 00:38:11,890 --> 00:38:13,650 Just think if animals had guns. 573 00:38:18,910 --> 00:38:20,630 So most animals have these means. 574 00:38:20,630 --> 00:38:23,990 It's not that animals never kill each other, but it's very rare. 575 00:38:30,210 --> 00:38:35,290 There are also innate responses to get a young one who, 576 00:38:35,290 --> 00:38:38,680 when he's flying becomes very adventurous and very energetic 577 00:38:38,680 --> 00:38:43,090 and might fly so far from home that he gets lost, 578 00:38:43,090 --> 00:38:44,820 and it would be difficult for him even 579 00:38:44,820 --> 00:38:47,150 to find his way back-- so the older jackdaws 580 00:38:47,150 --> 00:38:51,680 will try to entice a young one that's missing. 581 00:38:51,680 --> 00:38:55,510 They will find him, and they of course, have very good vision. 582 00:38:55,510 --> 00:38:58,986 They can fly up and often find the young 583 00:38:58,986 --> 00:39:01,230 that are straying so far. 584 00:39:01,230 --> 00:39:03,160 How do they get them to come back? 585 00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:06,090 It's done by, again, the combination 586 00:39:06,090 --> 00:39:09,430 of the auditory and the visual stimuli. 587 00:39:09,430 --> 00:39:11,670 They have this fly with me call. 588 00:39:11,670 --> 00:39:16,210 The kya-kya sound, and it changes a little bit 589 00:39:16,210 --> 00:39:21,060 to what Lorenz calls a kya sound, slightly 590 00:39:21,060 --> 00:39:22,360 different in the way it sounds. 591 00:39:25,180 --> 00:39:28,130 will make this sound, flying at the young bird, 592 00:39:28,130 --> 00:39:30,860 and then they will turn and fly away. 593 00:39:30,860 --> 00:39:35,250 And as they fly away, that produces a visual stimulus 594 00:39:35,250 --> 00:39:41,380 that the young jackdaw finds very hard not to follow. 595 00:39:41,380 --> 00:39:44,980 The combination of that loud sound they're making, 596 00:39:44,980 --> 00:39:49,390 plus the way they're flying, serves as innate 597 00:39:49,390 --> 00:39:51,980 releasing stimuli, we would call them. 598 00:39:51,980 --> 00:39:55,150 Provide the key stimulus to get the following response-- 599 00:39:55,150 --> 00:39:57,600 and they fly after the older animal. 600 00:40:02,080 --> 00:40:03,675 What time are we at, here? 601 00:40:09,600 --> 00:40:11,610 I didn't put this in the journal file. 602 00:40:11,610 --> 00:40:14,750 I will go to the PowerPoint. 603 00:40:14,750 --> 00:40:21,040 I want to get started here with more specific discussion 604 00:40:21,040 --> 00:40:23,760 of innate behavior. 605 00:40:23,760 --> 00:40:29,117 The technical term in ethology is the fixed action pattern. 606 00:40:29,117 --> 00:40:30,950 That will lead to a little bit of discussion 607 00:40:30,950 --> 00:40:32,250 of the central nervous system. 608 00:40:32,250 --> 00:40:35,350 We won't be talking a lot about the CNS, 609 00:40:35,350 --> 00:40:38,510 but we will talk about it. 610 00:40:38,510 --> 00:40:41,980 Next time I will show you the film. 611 00:40:41,980 --> 00:40:45,710 It's from a TV program, The Wild Wild World of Animals, 612 00:40:45,710 --> 00:40:53,870 but it's a historic film that shows Lorenz and his ducks that 613 00:40:53,870 --> 00:40:55,260 were imprinted on him. 614 00:40:58,700 --> 00:41:00,940 Then the film goes on. 615 00:41:00,940 --> 00:41:05,960 It films some of the work of Lorenz and his students 616 00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:09,730 and coworkers, showing natural response to predators 617 00:41:09,730 --> 00:41:13,730 by geese and some of the work they've 618 00:41:13,730 --> 00:41:17,590 done on imprinting and the effects on social life 619 00:41:17,590 --> 00:41:18,345 by geese. 620 00:41:21,670 --> 00:41:23,650 We'll talk about the innate responses. 621 00:41:23,650 --> 00:41:28,370 I'll go through this next time, some of the stimuli they used. 622 00:41:28,370 --> 00:41:31,030 But let's talk about fixed action patterns. 623 00:41:31,030 --> 00:41:33,530 We have at least time to define it. 624 00:41:38,060 --> 00:41:41,420 This will come up again in the class, and I can tell you, 625 00:41:41,420 --> 00:41:44,390 many students get confused about some of this, 626 00:41:44,390 --> 00:41:49,400 so I'd like to go through it more than once. 627 00:41:49,400 --> 00:41:51,590 What is a fixed action pattern? 628 00:41:51,590 --> 00:41:53,360 When we think of a fixed-action pattern, 629 00:41:53,360 --> 00:41:56,200 it sounds like we're just talking about what, 630 00:41:56,200 --> 00:41:59,320 to the ethologist, is only one component in the fixed action 631 00:41:59,320 --> 00:42:02,920 pattern-- the motor pattern, the fixed motor pattern, 632 00:42:02,920 --> 00:42:05,250 an innate sequence of behavior. 633 00:42:08,020 --> 00:42:12,500 These are examples in the human-- smiling, 634 00:42:12,500 --> 00:42:15,940 frowning, many other expressions of emotion. 635 00:42:15,940 --> 00:42:21,150 They're the same or very similar in all humans, 636 00:42:21,150 --> 00:42:24,970 in different cultures, in fact. 637 00:42:24,970 --> 00:42:27,530 They're similar, as Eibesfeldt showed, 638 00:42:27,530 --> 00:42:31,280 in humans that have never seen another human doing it, 639 00:42:31,280 --> 00:42:34,870 because they were going blind or even born blind and deaf. 640 00:42:34,870 --> 00:42:36,970 Yet they do it. 641 00:42:36,970 --> 00:42:40,400 Walking is another fixed action pattern. 642 00:42:40,400 --> 00:42:43,520 It's a particularly important, multi-purpose pattern 643 00:42:43,520 --> 00:42:44,110 of action. 644 00:42:46,920 --> 00:42:51,695 Eye blink and swallowing are fixed action patterns. 645 00:42:55,530 --> 00:42:57,560 Why are we calling them fixed action patterns? 646 00:42:57,560 --> 00:43:00,290 Those last two, eye-blink and swallowing are, 647 00:43:00,290 --> 00:43:02,240 if you read in the medical texts, 648 00:43:02,240 --> 00:43:08,106 they're called reflexes, swallowing reflex and eye-blink 649 00:43:08,106 --> 00:43:08,605 reflex. 650 00:43:12,600 --> 00:43:17,210 Is a fixed action pattern any different from a reflex? 651 00:43:17,210 --> 00:43:19,910 Isn't it just a more complex reflex? 652 00:43:19,910 --> 00:43:22,290 So we'll call that a reflex if it's something very simple 653 00:43:22,290 --> 00:43:26,046 like withdrawal of a limb from a painful stimulus, 654 00:43:26,046 --> 00:43:28,046 but we'll call it a fixed action pattern if it's 655 00:43:28,046 --> 00:43:29,170 a more complex sequence. 656 00:43:33,070 --> 00:43:35,560 The author of that little book I'm having you 657 00:43:35,560 --> 00:43:39,800 read, Graham Scott-- actually that's 658 00:43:39,800 --> 00:43:41,160 the way he uses the term. 659 00:43:50,210 --> 00:43:52,250 He really just means automatic. 660 00:43:52,250 --> 00:43:53,630 That's what he means by reflex. 661 00:43:53,630 --> 00:43:55,430 It's something that happens automatically 662 00:43:55,430 --> 00:43:57,340 with a certain stimulus. 663 00:43:57,340 --> 00:44:00,320 But is that not what a fixed action pattern is? 664 00:44:00,320 --> 00:44:02,270 And the answer is no. 665 00:44:02,270 --> 00:44:05,207 We will follow Konrad Lorenz in talking about it. 666 00:44:09,080 --> 00:44:13,480 I want you to learn the Lorenz view, which distinguishes 667 00:44:13,480 --> 00:44:17,190 pretty clearly between fixed action pattern and reflex. 668 00:44:17,190 --> 00:44:20,290 A reflex is something that's always there, 669 00:44:20,290 --> 00:44:22,780 no matter what my motivational state. 670 00:44:22,780 --> 00:44:26,580 When I'm walking, I'm responding in a reflex way 671 00:44:26,580 --> 00:44:29,440 to stimuli from my feet. 672 00:44:29,440 --> 00:44:36,600 If I'm on uneven terrain, I adjust my gait to the terrain. 673 00:44:36,600 --> 00:44:39,110 Some species do that much better than others, 674 00:44:39,110 --> 00:44:44,800 like a goat or a donkey, in fact, 675 00:44:44,800 --> 00:44:49,220 or a mule does it much better than a horse. 676 00:44:49,220 --> 00:44:52,070 Horses evolved to run on the plains. 677 00:44:52,070 --> 00:44:57,700 These other animals evolved to live in hillier terrain, 678 00:44:57,700 --> 00:45:00,900 so we talk about some animals being more sure-footed 679 00:45:00,900 --> 00:45:01,410 than others. 680 00:45:01,410 --> 00:45:03,540 There's just a difference in the reflex patterns 681 00:45:03,540 --> 00:45:04,498 that they've inherited. 682 00:45:07,160 --> 00:45:09,570 But why am I saying those are reflexes? 683 00:45:09,570 --> 00:45:13,110 Because a reflex is something like a mantle 684 00:45:13,110 --> 00:45:14,295 you're always wearing. 685 00:45:14,295 --> 00:45:17,670 It doesn't matter whether you're hungry or not hungry, 686 00:45:17,670 --> 00:45:19,540 whether your horny or not horny-- no 687 00:45:19,540 --> 00:45:21,250 matter what your motivational state, 688 00:45:21,250 --> 00:45:24,010 you still have those same reflexes. 689 00:45:24,010 --> 00:45:27,000 It's a background. 690 00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:28,700 That's why we call it just a mantle. 691 00:45:28,700 --> 00:45:32,300 You always have that. 692 00:45:32,300 --> 00:45:34,750 But what about a fixed action pattern? 693 00:45:34,750 --> 00:45:38,400 It has a motivational component. 694 00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:40,500 So I go through that here. 695 00:45:43,680 --> 00:45:47,210 A component of the fixed-action pattern 696 00:45:47,210 --> 00:45:51,390 is what Lorenz called-- and different psychologists have 697 00:45:51,390 --> 00:45:53,610 used different names for this. 698 00:45:53,610 --> 00:45:58,360 In the West we often just talk about a drive or level 699 00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:04,370 of motivation, but the ethologists following Lorenz 700 00:46:04,370 --> 00:46:05,615 have been much more specific. 701 00:46:08,450 --> 00:46:13,690 He calls it an action-specific potential. 702 00:46:13,690 --> 00:46:18,640 Something in the brain that can change in its level, 703 00:46:18,640 --> 00:46:22,750 is specific to a specific action, a specific motor 704 00:46:22,750 --> 00:46:25,210 pattern. 705 00:46:25,210 --> 00:46:28,100 It's an internal level of activation 706 00:46:28,100 --> 00:46:33,440 of a drive or a central motivational state. 707 00:46:33,440 --> 00:46:35,470 It's been called the central motive state 708 00:46:35,470 --> 00:46:38,700 by the psychologist, Peter Milner. 709 00:46:38,700 --> 00:46:41,530 He was a physiological psychologist-- 710 00:46:41,530 --> 00:46:43,870 or is-- in Canada. 711 00:46:43,870 --> 00:46:46,770 Many people here just call it a drive. 712 00:46:46,770 --> 00:46:51,660 The action-specific potential for most fixed action patterns 713 00:46:51,660 --> 00:46:56,020 builds up pretty steadily over time. 714 00:46:56,020 --> 00:46:58,840 And what that does is increases the probability 715 00:46:58,840 --> 00:47:02,390 of discharge of the motor pattern. 716 00:47:02,390 --> 00:47:06,020 How it does that is the thresholds for eliciting 717 00:47:06,020 --> 00:47:10,240 the fixed-motor pattern become lowered. 718 00:47:10,240 --> 00:47:13,740 In fact, they can get so low, if the level of drive 719 00:47:13,740 --> 00:47:17,780 is very, very high, that almost any stimulus can elicit it. 720 00:47:17,780 --> 00:47:19,780 When that happens, we could say well 721 00:47:19,780 --> 00:47:24,140 it's like they're discharged in a vacuum, almost no stimulus, 722 00:47:24,140 --> 00:47:27,500 but all it is is this extreme lowering of thresholds 723 00:47:27,500 --> 00:47:29,295 for eliciting the fixed action pattern. 724 00:47:29,295 --> 00:47:31,420 That doesn't happen with reflexes. 725 00:47:31,420 --> 00:47:33,490 The threshold for eliciting reflex 726 00:47:33,490 --> 00:47:36,580 does change with current conditions. 727 00:47:36,580 --> 00:47:39,490 Like the tendency to withdraw my limb, 728 00:47:39,490 --> 00:47:44,810 the t tendency will increase if I'm frightened. 729 00:47:44,810 --> 00:47:49,315 Say I go into a dark basement, and somebody tells me there 730 00:47:49,315 --> 00:47:51,710 are rats down there, I'm going to be much more 731 00:47:51,710 --> 00:47:55,910 likely to withdraw if I touch something I wasn't expecting. 732 00:47:55,910 --> 00:47:59,230 But that's not a fixed action pattern. 733 00:47:59,230 --> 00:48:01,740 It's a simple reflex that's threshold 734 00:48:01,740 --> 00:48:05,300 has been adjusted by the current situation. 735 00:48:05,300 --> 00:48:08,840 But the motivational level of a fixed action pattern 736 00:48:08,840 --> 00:48:14,440 will change steadily over time, regardless of the situation. 737 00:48:14,440 --> 00:48:17,260 The stimuli you're exposed to, though, 738 00:48:17,260 --> 00:48:22,090 can be the major way that its [INAUDIBLE] will change. 739 00:48:22,090 --> 00:48:25,170 Its level of activation will change, so in that way 740 00:48:25,170 --> 00:48:29,025 it is a little similar to a reflex. 741 00:48:29,025 --> 00:48:30,150 That's the end of the hour. 742 00:48:30,150 --> 00:48:33,710 We're going to come back to this slide next time 743 00:48:33,710 --> 00:48:38,040 and start there after we see the film.