Learning: Appearances Are Deceptive

Abstract

Let us begin our critical stock-taking straight away with that category of behavior that perhaps demonstrates best the embodiment of development and progress concerning cognition. If something is learned, whether by an animal or a person, this formulation alone seems to include a growth in cognition. No other behavior is so strongly associated with cognitive progress as everything that has the slightest thing to do with learning. Classical behavioral research itself has contributed a great deal to this point of view in that it has always emphasized the sharp contrast between innate instincts and learned reactions (Tinbergen 1951). In this way, the one was ultimately defined by exclusion of the other. If a certain behavior could not be incontrovertibly proved to be innate in the course of certain experiments, it was then thought logically to represent an individually acquired ability, i.e., something really new. Experiments with so-called experience deprivation were used to find out if the behavior of an animal was innate or it could only have been acquired by its own individual experience. When a very definite reaction (courting display to the opposite sex, flight behavior with regard to predators, feeding behavior towards the natural food of the species), on first contact with the object which triggers the response, was shown correctly and, above all completely, it was concluded that the animal already possessed the appropriate, probably innate knowledge that enabled it to react in such a way as to increase its chances of survival.

We are so apt to admire instincts as something very extraordinary by all the disquisitions of human understanding. But our wonder will perhaps cease, when we consider, that the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts in us unknown to ourselves.

David Hume

Likewise, my CS-US-FB sequence is a mnemonic device for recalling that some species, like us, often fabricate associative behavioral strategies with Tolman’s lucid cognitions in the service of Lorenz’s blind instinctive processes which have been embedded in the anatomical structure of the species by natural selection (CS ... conditioned stimulus, US ... unconditioned stimulus, FB ... instinctive feedback).

John Garcia