Animal trial and error learning

Think about the word “intelligence”. What does it mean for animals to be intelligent? How can you tell if an animal is really smart? After all, animals can’t speak and don’t use words. They cannot express ideas, learn history or spelling.

Still, animals can do many things. Perhaps your goldfish will move closer to the aquarium and swim to the surface in search of food. Or the cat may ring the doorbell when he wants to enter the house. Many other animals can even perform tricks and tasks. The circus is full of dancing bears, playful sea lions, hard-working elephants and prancing horses. Such behavior is often misidentified as a sign of intelligence. As you can see, performing a trick is not really a sign of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to reason. It is the ability to solve sudden flashes of ideas, or new problems, directly or using previous experience. You don’t need the ability to think, reason, or have ideas to perform tricks or tasks.

Tricks can be learned through a special kind of learning. One method of learning is by trial and error. The other is due to the conditional response. It is important to understand how such learning behavior works. Then you will be able to understand the difference between tricks and truly intelligent behavior.

One of the most difficult problems for psychologists is finding a way to test their intelligence. A conditional response is not a sign of intelligence. Nevertheless, they are part of animal behavior and can help psychologists compare differences in learning styles of different animals. Animals are also adjusted in other ways. You can learn to avoid places and objects by giving a mild harmless electric shock. You may also be forced to change normal behavior. Almost any animal can be tuned from flatworms. Another type of learning is done through trial and error. The most famous method of trial and error is the maze.

The mazes are all based on the same idea. That is, animals placed at the entrance need to find an exit. As you progress, you’ll find a series of branches. Animals must make a choice on each branch or fork. If you choose the wrong one, you will end up with a dead end. Then you need to go back to take another path. Many times later, the animal can run through the maze without making mistakes. The final reward is food for hungry animals. The maze can be very simple or very difficult, depending on the purpose of the psychologist. Experiments have shown that ants can learn not only very complex mazes, but also frogs, turtles, rats, cockroaches and crabs.

Another way to study learning trial and error is to put the animals in a box. The food is placed outside and animals can reach the food simply by unlocking the door. Next, the animal must open the same door to return to the box. The problem is the same in both cases. It’s about coming up with a lock to open the door. We know that raccoons can learn to unlock really complex locks. Monkeys can be unlocked in a special order, but they can be awkward due to their temperament. At first, humans took as long as monkeys to unlock in a special order. But once learned, they were much faster to open them. The reason why humans took so long is fairly simple. Since learning the order is a trial-and-error learning, there is no way to see the order by looking at the lock. Insights and reasoning are less useful here than mazes. Therefore, in the first stages of learning trial and error, humans were not fast either.