Operant Mechanisms in Physiological Regulation

Abstract

Much behavioral research in the past 20 years has been aimed at delineating the natural or biological constraints on learning. Ethologists have described many elaborate, apparently innate behaviors in a variety of species, and experimental psychologists have gathered data indicating unexpected difficulty in establishing escape/avoidance behavior to shock (Bolles, 1970) or discriminated avoidance to arbitrary cues (Revusky & Garcia, 1970). However, the demonstration that a behavior can be elaborated without learning, that a particular stimulus is less efficient in a particular laboratory situation, or that an avoidance response is not automatically shaped in a particular apparatus does not directly imply inviolable limits to behavioral plasticity. Even genetically determined behaviors may depend on learning in a variety of ways; the work of Nottebohm (1982) on the physiological and behavioral determinants of bird-song illustrates this point with particular clarity.