sbrunnoc@eagle.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) (04/09/88)
In article <649@dukempd.UUCP> crown@dukempd.UUCP (Rick Crownover) writes: > > Regarding the question of whether "any" behavior is hard wired. >I recall reading about behavior-response pairings which were apparently >not possible. > Anyone heard of this experiment, and remember the details? This phenomena was discovered by Marian and Keller Breland, two former associates of Skinner who started a company in Arkansas called Animal Behavior Enterprises. They used operant conditioning techniques pioneered by Skinner to train a variety (38 species) of animals for display at fairs, carnivals and other shows. The Brelands encountered many problems with animals who were intially conditionable but would begin regressing to past behavior patterns. For example, the Brelands once trained a racoon to pick up a coins and deposit them into a box. There was no problem in conditioning the racoon to pick up a coin but the racoon would hesitate to put the coin into the box. The problem was more readily apparent when the Brelands tried to train the racoon to pick up two coins simultaneously and deposit them into a box. The racoon would rub the coins together, dip them into the box, take them out again, and start over. It seemed that the racoon's innate eating behavior patterns were too strong to be overcome by operant conditioning. The Brelands called this phenomena instinctual drift and detailed it in their 1961 article "The Misbehavior of Organisms". I never read the article, I got the reference from one of my textbooks, Hergenhahn's Theories of Learning. Sean Brunnock University of Lowell sbrunnoc@eagle.cs.ulowell.edu