Grade 6 | Lesson 8

Science

Lesson Overview

Life Science

• Learning

Life Science

Learning
An instinctive behavior is inherited: you're born with it. In contrast, a learned behavior is developed form experience. Although humans and some animals do inherit an instinct to learn, the content of their learning is determined by their experience.

Instinctive behavior does not change; it stays the same even when circumstances change. Birds migrate in the winter months even when the weather stays warm. But learned behavior is more flexible. Humans don't hibernate in winter, and most humans don't change where they live seasonally. Instead, they have learned to dress for evolution to change our responses to the environment; instead, learned behavior enables us to respond quickly to changing circumstances.

To learn from an experience, an organism must have a memory to store information to be used later. Memory helps an organism learn through trial and error. In trial-and-error learning, an organism tries to do a task again and again, sometimes making mistakes, but other times succeeding. Eventually the organism figures out what it did to succeed. A mouse will learn how to get through a maze to find food at the end by trying different routes again and again. The mouse eventually remembers which routes don't lead to food and which do.

Animals learn not only by trial and error, but also learn by conditioning, which involves a system of rewards or punishments. If you have a dog, you and your parents probably trained it in this way. A Russian scientist named Pavlov once conducted a famous experiment in conditioning. Pavlov rang a bell every time he offered food to a group of dogs. The dogs would begin to salivate when they were fed. After repeating this action many times, Pavlov continued to ring the bell, but without feeding the dogs. He discovered that the dogs still began to salivate every time he rang the bell.

Conditioned behavior can lead to the development of habits. Habits are learned behaviors that are repeated so often they are performed almost without thinking. They seem almost instinctive. What are some of your good habits? What about bad habits?

Another way animals learn is through imitation. Some young birds learn to fly by imitating their parents. Young eagles learn to hunt by watching their parents and imitating them. You learned to speak by imitating the speech of other people.

The maze reflected in the mirror was built for experimental purposes. Although it has fourteen blind alleys, rats can make their way through it quickly.

Pavlov (center) and his staff.

They young osprey on the left is learning to fly by watching its parent.

Humans can learn through reasoning, building on what they already know. Just like these boys reasoning out a project together, you do this every day, in school and out.

These twins are star college basketball players. Twins, human and animal, provide scientists with a unique opportunity to study nature versus nurture, especially when they have been by some circumstances separated at birth. Why is this so?

Humans and other more advanced animals such as chimps have the ability to learn in the most complex way of all; through reasoning. Reasoning is the process of forming conclusions based on information and experience. It allows us to build on previous knowledge, to put information together to come up with new information -- for example, to add 2 and 2 to get 4. One very important result of reasoning is that it enables animals to solve problems and respond to difficulties in their environment even when those difficulties are new to them.

It is sometimes hard to determine whether an animal is able to reason. Scientists are very careful not to assume this ability in a species until they have experimental evidence to prove it exists. There are many studies of dolphins and porpoises that suggest they have highly developed reasoning abilities. It appears that brain size is not as important to reasoning as is the texture of the brain's surface: the smoother the brain surface, the lower the ability of an animal to reason.

How much of an organism's behavior is inherited and how much is learned? No one really knows. This question has been the subject of debate for many years. Because genes are natural in origin and learning is a product of upbringing or nurturing, this debate is known as the "nature versus nurture" controversy.

Research It!
Where are you on nature vs. nurture? Why?