Abstract
It is probable that all animals are capable of changing their behavior as a result of individual experience. In many cases, it can be shown that these changes are not attributable to sensory adaptation or to muscular fatigue, and it is assumed that central nervous processes are responsible. Animals differ widely in the extent and rapidity with which they can alter their actions as a result of experience. At one end of the scale one finds creatures like ourselves and sophisticated invertebrate predators, like the cephalopods to be discussed below, animals that can learn to make fine distinctions between things that they see or touch within a few trials, and which probably base a good deal of their normal individual behavior on the results of trial and error experimentation with their environment. At the other extreme are the coelenterate polyps, organisms that undoubtedly show adaptive behavior, but for which there is as yet no unequivocal evidence to eliminate explanations based on muscular or sensory fatigue (Robson 1965; Ross 1965). Between the two extremes are a whole range of animals, from flatworms to annelids and arthropods, all of which appear at times to learn under the sort of conditions that would lead to central nervous changes in higher forms. More specifically, they can be shown to change their actions as a result of events consequent upon these actions.
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© 1968 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
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Wells, M.J. (1968). Sensitization and the Evolution of Associative Learning. In: Salánki, J. (eds) Neurobiology of Invertebrates. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8618-0_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8618-0_28
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