stereotyped response

stereotyped response, unlearned behavioral reaction of an organism to some environmental stimulus. It is an adaptive mechanism and may be expressed in a variety of ways. All living organisms exhibit one or more types of stereotyped response.

General considerations

The capacity for unlearned behaviour is genetically determined in much the same sense as are the position, size, shape, and function of organs. Like structural features, stereotyped responses are the result of a continuing process of evolutionary modification and refinement. Those actions that most successfully aid the animal or plant in its basic drives (e.g., reproduction, search for nourishment, escape from predators) are the ones most likely to be retained in succeeding generations. As environmental conditions change, inherently determined responses also become modified in order to ensure continuation of the species.

The problems that arise in the study of stereotyped responses are many and varied. Particular responses in animals do not readily lend themselves to identification in highly evolved forms because learned behaviour patterns obscure the underlying unlearned behaviour; in addition, stereotyped responses provide the building blocks of instinctive behaviour, the complexity of which may obscure the integral parts (see instinct). In lower animals, just as in plants, in which learned behaviour is absent or nil, the analysis of behavioral mechanisms is limited by the fact that many of the most fundamental cell processes are not well understood.

Animal behaviour, as a branch of psychology, represents a confluence between the disciplines of ethology and comparative psychology. Most of the pioneer work in stereotyped responses of animals was done by ethologists. During the first half of the 20th century, when much of the groundwork in experimental psychology was laid, ethologists (who were for the most part European) concerned themselves with behaviour in insects, fishes, and birds and were particularly interested in the evolution of instinct. The comparative psychologists during this formative period were mostly Americans. They studied primarily behaviour in common laboratory animals such as guinea pigs, mice, rats, and monkeys, and their interest tended to focus on environmental influences on behaviour as opposed to genetic influences. Since the 1950s, psychologists in general have recognized that both environmental and genetic factors play essential roles in any biological phenomenon. As a consequence of the separate development of ethology and comparative psychology, however, some difficulties have arisen in the use of terminology. The German-American biologist Jacques Loeb applied the term tropism to all oriented movements of organisms, and he proposed that all behaviour is composed of tropisms. Subsequently, to avoid confusion, the terms taxes (singular: taxis) and kineses were introduced by other investigators to refer to animal responses other than those of sedentary, plantlike forms. The terms also have been applied to certain plant movements. Although a variety of discrete stereotyped response movements occur in plants, particularly in higher forms such as flowering plants, these autonomous movements usually occur too slowly to permit detection by casual observation. That movements of plants or plant organs actually take place can be strikingly demonstrated by time-lapse photography, in which single photographs are taken at regular intervals as brief as seconds or as long as several days or more. The photographs are then compared or viewed in rapid sequence as a motion picture.

Types of stereotyped responses

Stereotyped response in animals may be separated into the following four categories: unorganized or poorly organized response, reflex movements of a particular part of an organism, reflex-like activity of an entire organism, and instinct.

Unorganized or poorly organized responses are given by early embryos or by animals (such as sponges) that lack nervous systems.

Reflex

Reflexes proper, or reflex-arc movements, include responses such as the immediate withdrawal of the hand on touching a hot surface. The basic components of the reflex arc are the receptor, or sensory-nerve cell, which senses the stimulus, and the affector, the nerve cell that directly activates the muscle. These are a theoretical minimum rather than an observed functional arrangement of cells in the body of an animal (see instinct: Varieties of instinctive behaviour).

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