VMBO Year 3 · Behaviour · Section 8.3

Innate and learned behaviour

Inherited influences and experience

Behaviour is influenced by both inherited factors and experience. Innate behaviour develops without needing to learn that particular behaviour through experience. It may be present at birth or appear later as the organism matures. Learned behaviour changes through experience during an organism's life. In practice, many behaviours involve both.

Different forms of learning

• Imprinting: learning during an early sensitive period, such as learning which individual to follow in some young birds.
• Trial and error: trying different actions and retaining those that work.
• Conditioning: learning associations, including between an action and its consequences.
• Habituation: a reduced response to a repeated, harmless stimulus.

How do these learning processes work?

During imprinting, particular experiences have a lasting effect within a sensitive developmental period. Learning the same association may be much harder later, although sensitive periods are not identical or completely inflexible in every species.

During trial-and-error learning, an animal tries actions and learns from their outcomes. Success makes useful actions more likely to be repeated. Operant conditioning describes learning through consequences: reinforcement increases a behaviour, while punishment can decrease it. A dog learning an action followed by a reward is an example. Another form, classical conditioning, links one stimulus with another.

During habituation, an animal responds less strongly to a repeated stimulus that has no important consequence. It may stop startling at a familiar harmless noise. This is learning, rather than simply fatigue of its muscles or senses.

Behaviour combines influences

An inherited ability to respond and a history of learning often work together. Distinguishing innate and learned contributions helps explain behaviour, but most complex behaviour cannot be placed entirely in one category.