Instinctual behavior

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Dominican gull chick pecks at the red spot on the top of the mother's beak (and triggers regurgitation of food from the goiter).

Instinct behavior (also: hereditary behavior ) is a technical term of the instinct theory of classical comparative behavioral research (ethology) developed mainly by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen . It describes an innate , complex behavior that is built up from mutually definable "basic building blocks" of behavior: from instinctive movements (meaning: "hereditary coordination", more recently also Fixed Action Pattern , FAP). These inherited, mutually coordinated movements form, as it were, the "skeleton" of the behavior of an animal species: "Similar to the body features, they represent species characteristics, so they are found in essentially the same form in all individuals of a species."

Instinctive movements - the “building blocks” of instinctual behavior

According to the instinct theory first formulated by Konrad Lorenz in 1937 , instinctive movements are triggered by a key stimulus and can continue as long as there is an inner willingness to act . "In many cases, however, it is not just a hereditary-coordinated mode of movement that is activated by a certain excitation quality, but rather a whole series of sharply separated instinctual movements that are assigned in a regular order to the different intensities of the same excitation quality." a behavior is innate, one of the things that counts is its “maturation”, that is, its perfection in the course of individual development without practice.

Since behavior is made up of muscle actions, a really accurate and objective description of these muscle actions should be. “Although various researchers were aware of this and realized this for one or the other movement themselves, no one has made the consequent attempt to describe the behavior inventory in this way. In these studies, larger units of muscle actions are usually used to describe and then, for example, grazing , capturing , stepping on the milk , threatening , riding , etc. It is a matter of course for the investigator to regard such types of movements as units. This is mainly due to the fact that these movements are characteristic of certain species, families and genera. These movements vary only slightly within the individual species; constant individual differences are only noticeable after constant, meticulous study of a species. "

features

Although the cuckoo is raised by adoptive parents of a different species , it masters the (simple) "singing" of its own species.

Lorenz referred explicitly to the preparatory work by Oskar Heinroth , who had summarized the reaction of an animal to specific triggering stimulus configurations and the subsequent movement as a "species-specific instinctual act"; According to Heinroth, such an instinctual act consisted “of the animal's active striving for a certain stimulus situation - hence the term 'instinct' - then of the reactive response of the triggering mechanism to this stimulus configuration and finally of the following sequence of one or more instinctive movements.” Lorenz however, recommended a conceptual separation: "On the one hand, the innate 'recognition' of a relevant environmental situation and, on the other hand, the innate 'ability' of the teleonomic behavior in this situation are two physiologically completely different performances." Instinctual movements therefore exist - According to Lorenz - from mutually independent sub-elements, namely from the innate recognition of a triggering situation (the key stimulus), an activation mechanism (the innate trigger mechanism , AAM), a movement component that enables a taxi and a specific inner drive for di e movement component (introduced by Lorenz under the name “action-specific excitation”).

According to Lorenz, another central characteristic of instinctual movements is that the all-or-nothing law known from the physiology of the central nervous system does not apply to them. Rather, he assumes the process of “a permanently endogenously produced” action-specific excitation, which is possibly “broken down by the sequence of movements”. The consequence of this is that the continuous increase in activity-specific arousal gradually becomes noticeable in the behavior of the individual, initially through “soft hints of movement”, called “ intentional movements ”, which “can stop at any point”. An intention movement is therefore "an expression of the mood of an animal and can thus serve the mutual understanding of conspecifics by showing the willingness to take a certain action." The activity-specific excitement increases without the associated trigger - the key stimulus - appearing , the specific instinctive movement can also take place without a key stimulus recognizable to the observer; We are talking about an appetite behavior which is not directed towards an immediately recognizable goal , which can be interpreted as a search for a key stimulus and when the object acting as a key stimulus is found, it can be transferred to a taxi. In this context, Lorenz points out that “the idea of ​​a specific quantum of excitability must correspond to a physiological reality. This quantum 'available' to the organism differs greatly from instinct to instinct, but also from species to species. "

The characteristics of an instinctual movement also include the so-called idling action : "If an experimental animal is kept under approximately normal environmental conditions, under which a decrease in general excitability does not occur, but under which the adequately triggering stimuli for a certain instinctual act are absent, it can happen that the movement in question is carried out without these specific stimuli, as we use to say 'idling'. ”In this case, the threshold from which an instinctive movement can be set in motion by a key stimulus is reduced to almost zero.

A certain behavior pattern must therefore meet four criteria in order to be considered innate and thus hereditary-coordinated behavior: It must

  • occur again and again in the same form (whereby undirected appetite behavior can be very variable),
  • occur in all individuals of their own species (depending on age and maturity),
  • also occur in isolated individuals of their own species (apart from the special case: imprinting ),
  • also occur in individuals who were previously prevented from exercising the behavior pattern.

The principle of double quantification

The interaction of the key stimulus and - according to Lorenz - the continuously endogenously produced action-specific excitation has the consequence that the intensity of an instinctive movement is determined by two independent variables, "namely 1. by the level of willingness to act or reaction-specific energy immediately before the stimulus is presented and 2. by the quality or intensity of the stimulus. ”A great willingness to act accordingly leads to a specific instinctive movement even with a weak key stimulus, conversely an optimal key stimulus can induce the instinctual movement even with a moderate willingness to act. Lorenz called this interaction of an external and an internal factor the principle of double quantification .

Historical

An early explanation of animal instinct dates back to the mid-19th century. The progressive and fundamentally new aspect of the concept of instinctual behavior in the 1930s was that animal behavior was neither viewed as purely reactive (as by the classical behaviorists ) nor as a chain of rigid reflexes , but that internal changes in state - i.e. the spontaneity of behavior - have been billed. Furthermore, the focus was particularly on innate, inherited behavior and its plasticity. Konrad Lorenz himself admitted in 1978 that he and his colleagues had “at first never thought deeply about those phenomena which we put aside in a very summary manner as learned or determined by insight. If one wants to describe our process a bit too pitilessly, we regard it as the collecting pot for everything that was outside of our analytical interest. "

Today, instinct theory hardly plays a role in behavioral biology , since brain research has so far not been able to find any physiological correspondence to the postulated action-specific arousal. Whether this is to be seen as a lack of the “physiological theory of instinctive movement” or is due to the experimental inadequacies of brain research that still exists cannot be decided at the moment.

In the field of education , the concept was revived in the early 21st century with attachment parenting .

See also

literature

  • Gerard Baerends : Structure of animal behavior. In: Handbook of Zoology. Volume 8: Mammalia. Part 10, 1st half, 1956, pp. 1-32.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Occasionally, these two variants are also referred to as undirected appetite behavior and directed appetite behavior, but this can be misleading because the search for a trigger is also targeted.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Konrad Lorenz : Comparative behavior research. Basics of ethology. Springer, Vienna and New York 1978, p. 40, ISBN 978-3-7091-3098-8 .
  2. ^ Wolfgang Schleidt : How "fixed" is the Fixed Action Pattern? In: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. Volume 36, 1974, pp. 184-211, doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1974.tb02131.x .
  3. ^ Uwe Jürgens and Detlev Ploog : From ethology to psychology. Kindler Verlag, Munich 1974, p. 17, ISBN 3-463-18124-X .
  4. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: About the concept of instinctive action. In: Folia Biotheoretica. Series B, No. 2, 1937, pp. 17–50, full text (PDF)
  5. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Foundations of Ethology, p. 89
  6. ^ Entry maturation in: Klaus Immelmann : Grzimeks Tierleben , supplementary volume behavior research. Kindler Verlag, Zurich 1974, p. 635.
  7. ↑ Gerard Baerends : Structure of animal behavior. In: Handbook of Zoology. Volume 8: Mammalia. 10th part, 1st half, 1956, p. 2.
  8. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Fundamentals of Ethology, pp. 87–88.
  9. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Foundations of Ethology, p. 95.
  10. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Fundamentals of Ethology, pp. 88–89.
  11. ^ Entry movement of intention in: Klaus Immelmann: Grzimeks Tierleben, supplementary volume Behavioral Research, p. 629.
  12. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Foundations of Ethology, p. 98.
  13. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Foundations of Ethology, p. 102.
  14. ↑ Uwe Jürgens and Detlev Ploog: From ethology to psychology, p. 27.
  15. ^ Louis Agassiz , AA Gould , M. Perty : Natural history of the animal kingdom, with special regard to trade, arts and practical life. (= People's natural history of the three realms for school and home , 3) JB Müller's Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1855, pp. 46–51.
  16. ↑ H.-P. Michael Freyer: On the history of the representation of animal behavior in teacher handbooks and school books from the 18th to the 20th century In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 18, 1999, pp. 241-269; especially pp. 250-252.
  17. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Comparative behavior research. Basics of Ethology, p. 7.