Intellectual behavior is already characteristic of many animal species. A feature of this stage is the animal’s ability to find, “invent” a new method of solution and, moreover, to transfer this method to another task, sometimes quite complex.
The difference between skill and intellectual behavior is clearly seen in the following example. In the laboratory of I.P. Pavlov conducted an experiment - a chimpanzee named Raphael was trained to pour water on a fire. It was done like this. A banana was placed in the feeder, and a fire was lit in front of it. Raphael could only get the banana by extinguishing it. Chimpanzees were taught to do this by taking water from a tank into a mug and pouring it on the fire.
After he learned to do this well, the task was made more difficult. Rafts were placed on the lake. One of them showed Raphael and a banana feeder with a fire burning in front of it. The water tank was placed on another raft. Both rafts were connected by a narrow bridge. Naturally, there was water around the rafts. However, in order to get a banana, Raphael climbed across the bridge to another raft, scooped up water from the tank, came back and poured on the fire.
Somewhat later, this experiment was repeated with other chimpanzee monkeys. One of them did not cross the bridge to the other raft. She simply scooped up water from the lake, turned on the fire and took out a banana.
The German psychologist W. Köhler (1887-1967) studied how higher primates - monkeys - overcome a situation where a preliminary action or certain preparation is required to achieve a goal (such problems are similar to arithmetic problems in two actions). For example, a banana was placed at some distance from the monkey's cage. A short stick was placed in the monkey's cage. And a little further away, so that you couldn’t reach it with your paw, a long stick. However, its length was enough to get the coveted banana. Experiments have shown that monkeys quickly find a solution: they use a short stick to get a long one, and then use the latter to get a banana. Moreover, this happens not due to the enumeration of possible options (the so-called trial and error method), but due to the “grasping”, “understanding” of new relationships, the ability to present objects in new combinations to perform new functions. Some of V. Köhler's monkeys even figured out how to insert one short stick into another. If you hang something attractive from the ceiling in the center of the room, and scatter boxes around the room, the monkey will figure out how to place them one on top of the other in order to get the attractive thing.
V. Köhler called this phenomenon “insight” - illumination, and another German psychologist K. Bühler (1879-1963) - “aha experience,” emphasizing that this happens without reasoning, immediately, suddenly.
By the way, our very smart domestic cats and dogs are not capable of solving such problems. The dog will sit for a long time in front of a piece of meat located at some distance from its cage, but will not “guess” to pull the string to which this meat is tied, and the end of which it can reach with its teeth.
A special form of intellectual behavior in animals is exploratory behavior. For example, scientists have conducted studies many times in which they taught laboratory rats to go through mazes to get food. It turned out that if the animal is hungry, it quickly finds the shortest path to the feeder and runs to it. If hunger is not very strong, then the rat begins to explore the maze in detail. In this case, the rat moves slowly, walks around and sniffs all the nooks and crannies. Moreover, sometimes she “specially” chooses paths at the end of which there is obviously nothing “tasty”, and she does not go to the same place twice in a row, but chooses a new path. Experiments on monkeys show that they are willing to perform actions that are quite difficult for them in order to be able to simply look at a toy or what is happening in the laboratory. At first glance, such behavior seems biologically inappropriate and not directly related to the satisfaction of needs. This, however, is not the case. Such behavior is biologically expedient because in real life conditions animals must know what surrounds them and where to find what they need. And for this it is necessary to explore the environment.
“Intelligent” behavior of animals, with all its complexity and versatility, is aimed mainly at solving problems determined by biological expediency and satisfying biologically significant needs. It always has a specific sensory-motor character. In order to establish connections between objects and phenomena (and this is an essential feature of intellectual activity), they need these objects and phenomena to be perceived visually and simultaneously. Animals, even higher ones - monkeys, are not capable of abstraction, generalization, conceptual thinking, or understanding of cause-and-effect relationships hidden from direct perception.
This becomes possible only at the next stage of mental development - human consciousness.
Instincts are called innate acts of behavior that arise in connection with complex (complex) stimuli emanating from both the external and internal environment. They consist of a sequential series of interrelated actions and are carried out as chain unconditioned reflexes, in which the effector part of one reflex serves as a trigger for the activation of the next one in the chain of reflexes. Instincts animals are diverse. They are always associated with important biological needs of the animal. Examples of them are: sexual instinct (for example, mating in birds, fighting for a female), caring for offspring (feeding larvae in ants, building nests, incubating eggs and feeding chicks in birds), herd instincts that encourage animals to unite in flocks, herds, etc.
Skills are complex conditioned reflexes that ensure differentiated adaptation of animals to changing environmental conditions and, therefore, better satisfaction of their needs. In contrast to instincts, skills are formed and consolidated during the individual life of an animal; they are based on stable temporary connections between certain stimuli and the animal’s response actions. Their formation becomes possible due to lability nervous system animals, its ability to form a wide variety of connections while relying not only on innate unconditioned reflexes, but also on already formed other conditioned reflexes. Skills are formed through long-term exercise, consisting of a series of repeated performances of certain actions. In the process of such an exercise, new temporary connections are formed, which are gradually differentiated and clarified. Thanks to skills, the animal's behavior becomes flexible and better adapted to changing environmental conditions. High development skills reach y animals endowed with the cerebral hemispheres. In these animals, the skills become more complex and varied, which is associated with further improvement of the reflective function of the nervous system.
By intellectual actions are called those in which the animal, based on the reflection of the connections and relationships existing between objects, solves new problems for it that have not previously been encountered in its experience. Intelligence is manifested by an animal when, in its actions, it encounters unusual difficulties, to overcome which instincts and skills are insufficient. In these cases, the animal's intelligence is manifested in the invention of a new method of action that has not been used by the animal before. Intellectual actions are the highest form of adaptation of animals to environment. They are based on complex conditioned reflex connections characteristic of the rational activity of animals. The intellectual behavior of animals is characterized by the following features :
- Animals show the ability to act intellectually when obstacles arise on the way to achieving a goal. If you can master food in the usual way, with the help of unconditioned reflexes and skills developed throughout life, intellectual actions do not occur.
- Intellectual actions arise to solve a new problem and consist in the invention of a new method of action.
- These actions are not stereotyped; they are individualized: some animals solve the problem in one way, others in another way.
- Monkeys use various objects (poles, sticks, etc.) as tools.
- The intellectual actions of animals are primitive in nature and do not stem from knowledge of the objective laws of nature. Intellectual actions of even higher apes, by their nature, do not go beyond the range of tasks put forward by the natural conditions of their life.
- In animals, intellectual actions do not occupy a dominant position in their behavior. Their main forms of adaptation to the environment are instincts and skills. Even among higher animals, intellectual actions manifest themselves from time to time: they arise in them, but do not acquire fundamental meaning and are not fixed in their experience.
7. Invented methods of action are not transferred from one animal to another and are therefore not a product of species experience. They remain the property only of the individual animal that discovers them.
There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between the human psyche and the animal psyche. The most complex intellectual form of animal behavior is carried out in the process of effective trials, which has the character of reflecting the known complex forms of relationships between objects that the animal perceives, highlighting possible ways decisions, inhibition of side inadequate solutions and development of those behavioral programs that lead to the desired goal.
An animal can not only use ready-made means, but can select the necessary means from the environment, and such selection of tools becomes such an independent form of activity that a monkey can spend hours, without distraction, trying to select the necessary tool (for example, break a stick from a very durable disk ), so that after the weapon is selected, it can be directly used as a means of obtaining bait.
Therefore in in this case The activity of the animal is no longer at all intellectual in nature, not in the nature of simply an elementary conditioned reflex or a habitual skill retained from previous experience - it seems to be a complex orienting activity, in the process of which a certain program is highlighted, the animal obeys this program, this image of the future means that it must be isolated from the material at his disposal. All this creates a dominant in the animal, sometimes pushing even a specific goal out of its immediate attention, which the animal forgets for a while until it selects a means that allows it to get the bait.
Thus, at the highest stage, higher animals with the development of the cerebral cortex, with powerful zones providing the synthesis of signals from different receptor zones, with developed synthetic activity, can perform very complex forms of behavior, program their behavior with complex images that arose in orientation activity.
All this may give the impression that the boundaries between animals and humans are blurring, and animals can provide such complex forms of intelligent behavior that they begin to look very similar to complex intelligent, intelligent forms of human behavior.
However, this impression, which at first glance may seem very obvious, turns out to be wrong. There are a number of fundamental differences in animal behavior from human behavior.
The first difference is that animal behavior is always carried out within a certain biological activity, within a specific biological motif.
An animal never does anything that does not serve a certain biological need, that would go beyond a certain biological meaning. Every animal activity is always ultimately either motivated by the preservation of the individual or motivated by the continuation of the species. The activity of an animal either serves the feeding instinct, i.e., it does something to get food, or the instinct of self-preservation (it performs an action to save itself from danger), or the instinct of procreation. An animal cannot do anything that would go beyond the limits of biological meaning, while a person devotes 9/10 of his activity to acts that do not have a direct, and sometimes even indirect, biological meaning.
There may be only one moment at which an animal seems to go beyond this rule: its powerful development of orienting-exploratory activity. Observing the great apes, I.P. Pavlov noted their difference from lower standing animals, dogs, cats, especially from rabbits, guinea pigs. If a dog or cat has nothing to do, it falls asleep; if the monkey has nothing to do, it begins to explore, that is, touch, smell or finger the fur, sort through the leaves, and so on. All this time she is busy with what Pavlov called “disinterested indicative and research activities.” However, this sorting of objects, looking at, sniffing can also be interpreted as a certain unconditional orienting-exploratory reflex. If this is so, then fingering and sniffing, which is constantly detected by an idle monkey, are also biological instinctive activities.
Consequently, the first difference in the behavior of an animal is that all its behavior does not go beyond the limits of instinctive biological activity and is biologically motivated in nature.
The second difference between an animal and a person is somewhat more complicated. We say that an animal can use and even secrete tools. But now we need to make a certain correction or clarification of this fact, which at first glance brings the behavior of a monkey closer to human activity. An animal that uses and secretes tools always does this in a specific visually effective situation and never secures the allocated tool or retains the tool for future use.
It has been repeatedly shown by other studies that even after using a known tool, an animal begins to look for a new tool every time a new task is given.
We can therefore say that animals do not live in a world of permanent things that have permanent meaning. A thing acquires meaning for him only in a given specific situation, in the process of activity. One time the board can be a stand for the monkey, on which it jumps up to get a high-hanging fruit, another time it can play the role of a lever if it needs to get something; the third time - the role of a piece of wood that the monkey will break in order to chew it, and so on. A thing has no permanent meaning for her.
Therefore, we can say that if a person lives in the world of tools, then the monkey lives in the world of means for action.
The third difference is that the animal can only act within the limits of a visually perceived situation. it cannot, unlike a person, abstract from the visual situation and program its actions in accordance with an abstract principle.
If the programming of behavior in an animal is always limited to only two facts, in humans a third factor is added to these factors, which does not exist in animals. Behavior in animals is determined either by hereditarily deposited species programs, or by direct personal experience, in other words, either a specific, unconditioned, or conditioned reflex resulting from the individual experience of the animal. These two facts determine the behavior of the animal; they are factors in its psychological development. There is no such dog yet that, having gained a certain amount of experience in solving a problem, went up to another new dog and said in its ear: “This is how you need to solve the problem.” There is no animal that can transfer its experience to another animal.
In contrast, human psychological activity is characterized by the fact that a person, along with these two forms of behavior (programmed hereditarily and programmed by personal experience), has a third form of behavior, which becomes more and more dominant and begins to occupy a dominant place among us: such the form is the transfer of social experience from one person to another person. All learning at school, all the assimilation of knowledge, all the assimilation of work methods is essentially the transfer of generational experience to the individual, in other words, the transfer of social experience from one person to another.
Close to instinctive and simple forms Variable behavior in animals There is another form of behavior that is of interest. Animals exhibit some forms of truly intelligent intelligent behavior.
What constitutes the basis for the most complex forms of individual animal behavior, intellectual behavior? The basis of intellectual behavior appears to be the perception of complex relationships between objects in the external world. This is a further complication of the forms of reflection, which leads to the emergence of more interesting forms of behavior.
At first, the animal reflected individual properties, and these properties allowed the input of the innate species mechanisms inherent in nature. Then the animal began to perceive whole images of objects of reality and adapt to them; arose individually - changeable forms of objective behavior that can be illustrated in skills.
But there is a third, very significant form of reflection, which is very weakly identified in lower animals and is revealed more and more in higher animals. This is a reflection not of individual words, not of individual objects and situations, but of complex relationships between individual objects. It forms the basis of intellectual behavior.
An example is the analysis of the most elementary forms of reflection that the German psychologist Köhler conducted with chickens.
Two squares were placed in front of the chicken: one square was light gray, and the other was dark gray. Grains were poured onto both squares, but only on one, darker square, they lay freely, and on the other, lighter square, they were glued so that the chicken that tried to peck these grains did not get the effect. Gradually, the chicken learned to move towards the lighter square.
The question arose: does the chicken respond to the absolute color of the square, or to a relatively lighter square?
In order to answer this question, Köhler presented the chicken with two other squares - the same dark gray and an even darker one. The previous, darker square became relatively lighter in the new pair. Which square was the chicken going to?
It turns out that she immediately went to the lighter square, which was negative, and ignored the square that was not there before. Therefore, she was not responding to the absolute color of the square, but to the relationship between the two squares. In order to finally confirm his assumption, Köhler made a third experiment: he gave a light gray square, which was positive in the first experiment, and next to it an even lighter square, almost white, which was not there before.
In this control experiment, the hen never went to the light gray square, and, on the contrary, went to the white, previously positive square, which had never appeared in her previous experiment.
Thus, the chicken was clearly not responding to color, but to the relationship between two colors. This means that already at a fairly early stage of development there is a perception of not only properties, but also their relationships, there is some kind of elementary type of analysis of the situation, and not specific signs are identified, but signs that relate one object to another, such as potential differences.
This example is a classic one, it points to another elementary phenomenon. But we can give another example of the perception of relationships, which shows the same facts in much more interesting and complex forms.
The following experiment belongs to our Soviet physiologist - professor of the department of nervous activity of the university L.V. Krushinsky and is called an experiment with extrapolation reflex (English extrapolation reflex) - a term introduced by L.V. Krushinsky to designate an elementary unit of rational activity. reflex.
In this case we're talking about also about the perception of relationships, but not of space, but of the perception of relationships in time.
The apparatus on which this experiment is demonstrated consists of two opaque pipes. Into one of them, in front of the animal’s eyes, a bait is inserted on a rope - a piece of meat or a pack of grains for the bird. This bait moves in a closed tube. The animal sees how the bait enters the pipe, sees how the bait exits into the free hole and disappears again into the second pipe. How does the animal behave in this case?
As experiments have shown, animals with different levels of development react differently. Those animals that are at a lower stage of development (for example, chickens) react this way: they rush at the bait passing through the gap and try to grab it, despite the fact that it has passed by, in other words, they react only to the immediate impression.
The difference from them is animals that stand on more high level, give a completely different reaction: they look at the bait passing through the gap, then run to the end of the pipe and wait for the bait to appear at the open end.
This means that all these animals do not react to a direct impression, but extrapolate, that is, they take into account where a given object will appear if it moves. They anticipate the movement of an object, and this anticipatory behavior is a feature of highly developed animals. intelligent behavior animal reflection
This means that, along with the reaction to direct impressions, higher vertebrates have a certain type of anticipatory behavior, that is, a reaction taking into account the relationship between where the object is at the moment and where it will be in the future.
This behavior is already a type of reasonable behavior, which differs sharply from both instinctive and ordinary, more elementary forms of individually variable behavior.
These forms of behavior have become the subject of study by a number of psychologists and physiologists. The German psychologist Köhler, whom I mentioned above, was the person who was most involved in the study of this behavior; The American psychologist Cherks and the Georgian psychologist Beritashvili did a lot.
So many interesting facts was also obtained in this regard by the Soviet physiologist Protopopov.
The first group of researchers of such intellectual behavior is the so-called workaround technique. It is as follows: the animal was placed in a box in which one wall consists of a lattice. There is bait in front of the grate. The bait is positioned so that the animal cannot reach it directly. How do animals on the steps of the evolutionary ladder behave in this case?
An example given by Academician Beritov. The chicken, placed in the fence just described, perceives the grains and simply beats against the mesh, cannot in any way be distracted from the immediate image of the bait; a cow in similar conditions stands rather sluggishly, pokes its muzzle into the partition and makes no attempts to get around the fence. But the dog behaves completely differently; she tries several times to get the bait directly, and then does the exact opposite - she runs away from the bait, goes around the fence and takes the bait. The monkey does exactly the same.
Complex behavior occurring in the latter case is divided into three phases; the first phase is the phase of initial trials, attempts; if these attempts are successful, the animal inhibits its immediate reactions. After this, the second phase begins: the animal begins to explore the situation, and when this exploration ends, it performs the last act - it runs not to the bait, but from it, and this seemingly meaningless behavior receives its meaning only because in its As a result, the animal achieves its true goal.
Thus, if at the first stages of the phylogenetic ladder behavior is of an elementary, direct nature, if it is determined by the direct perception of a separate property, signal (shine for a mosquito, vibration for a spider) or a complex reflection of a directly perceived object (when an animal, for example, in experience delayed reactions, runs to the box in which the bait is hidden), then here the behavior of the animal takes on a complex character and begins to consist of a cycle of successive mutually subordinate links.
In such cases, we, somewhat simplifying the facts, say that the behavior of the animal acquires a polysemantic character; it begins with direct attempts, includes tentative research activities and ends with a series of organized, auxiliary operations, as a result of which it achieves the goal.
Some authors rightly say that the action here is divided into three phases: direct trials and orientation in the environment; in this first phase, an indicative basis for the future action is created and the general scheme those paths that can achieve the goal; executive operation, during which the animal carries out the developed action pattern, and therefore the third phase, during which the animal compares the achieved effect with the desired intention, and either completes the action (if it is consistent with the original intention) or continues it (if such consistency does not occur ).
It is not for nothing that researchers call this last phase the phase of action acceptance, and consider it the most important link in the self-regulatory behavior of animals.
Starting from the most elementary forms of intellectual behavior of an animal and ending with the most complex forms of intellectual behavior of a person, intellectual acts are always distinguished by the presence of such an indicative basis for action, such a strategy and tactics.
Let us turn to some classic experiments in which the intellectual behavior of animals was studied. These experiments were carried out by Köhler, and became known as the most elementary experiments with the use of tools.
The use of tools is always a typical intellectual action. After all, in order to use a tool and turn, for example, to a hammer, with the help of which a person beats off a piece of stone, which he then uses, he is forced to perform an act that has a known strategy and breaks down into a series of operations. Therefore, the use of tools can be a typical example of not only a simple objective action, but also a complex intellectual act. Because of this, Köhler turned to investigating whether monkeys were capable of a more complex form of intellectual action.
First simple experience. A monkey is in a cage, the front wall is grated, there is a bait outside the cage that the monkey cannot reach with his hand; There is a stick on the side, which is located closer than the bait. Can a monkey use a stick to get bait?
Experiments have shown the following: at first, the monkey tries in every possible way to get the bait with his hand - there is no strategy yet, there are direct attempts to get the bait with his hand; then, when these attempts prove futile, it stops and the next stage begins: the monkey looks around the situation, takes a stick, pulls it towards itself and uses the stick to take out the bait.
The second experience is more complex. The bait is even further away. On one side there is a short stick with which you can’t get the bait, and on the other hand, a little further, there is a long stick that is suitable for getting the bait.
The researcher poses a question: can a monkey first take a short stick, and then use a short stick to get a long stick and use a long stick to get the bait?
It turns out that for a monkey this task is much more difficult, but still accessible. The monkey makes direct attempts to get the bait for a very long time, becomes exhausted, then looks around the field, and, as Köhler describes, takes the first stick, and with its help he gets the second, and with the second stick - the bait.
Obviously, at this moment, says Köhler, the monkey has a schema for future action, a schema for the decision and a general strategy for action. Köhler even says that the monkey experiences something similar to what we experience when we say “aha, we understand,” and calls this act “aha - we’ll survive.”
The third experience is even more difficult. It is constructed in the same way as the second experiment, with the only difference being that the stick is in different fields of vision. When a monkey looks at one stick, it does not see the second, when it looks at the second, it does not see the first. In this case, the task for the monkey turns out to be almost insoluble. It is necessary, says Köhler, for both sticks and bait to be in the same field of view so that their relationship can be clearly perceived. Only under these conditions, if the monkey visually perceives the relationship of all three objects, can it develop a visual hypothesis of the solution and a corresponding strategy arise.
Kohler's last series of experiments were also experiments with the use of a tool, but these experiments were constructed somewhat differently. The bait is suspended high on a hook, the monkey must get it; Boxes are scattered around the square.
The solution is to take a box and place it on top of another box, construct a tower and retrieve the fruit.
The behavior of the monkey is approximately this: first, endlessly jumping towards the bait, trying to directly, directly get it. In such attempts the monkey displays amazing virtuosity. After this, the monkey gets tired, as Köhler describes, looks around the situations and then suddenly turns to the boxes.
She takes a box, places one box on top of another, and, interestingly, she sometimes places the boxes in such a way that they visually form one vertical whole, but cannot stay on top of each other. The monkey then tries to climb onto the boxes; sometimes she succeeds thanks to her dexterity, and then she takes out the high-hanging fruit. Consequently, in this experiment, the monkey can use certain tools in order to achieve the goal.
And here her behavior is divided into a number of successive links: first, helpless attempts and some kind of orientation in the surrounding reality, then a temporary retreat from directly solving the goal, inhibition of immediate attempts and turning to tools - to boxes, and, finally, the execution of that scheme, which was found by a monkey.
Such a complex nature of an action, which has a preliminary orienting basis and breaks up into a number of successive, mutually subordinate operations, can be called the structure of intellectual behavior.
Intelligent behavior already common to many animal species. A feature of this stage is the animal’s ability to find, “invent” a new method of solution and, moreover, to transfer this method to another task, sometimes quite complex.
The difference between skill and intellectual behavior is clearly seen in the following example. In the laboratory of I.P. Pavlov conducted an experiment - a chimpanzee named Raphael was trained to pour water on a fire. It was done like this. A banana was placed in the feeder, and a fire was lit in front of it. Raphael could only get the banana by extinguishing it. Chimpanzees were taught to do this by taking water from a tank into a mug and pouring it on the fire.
After he learned to do this well, the task was made more difficult. Rafts were placed on the lake. One of them showed Raphael and a banana feeder with a fire burning in front of it. The water tank was placed on another raft. Both rafts were connected by a narrow bridge. Naturally, there was water around the rafts. However, in order to get a banana, Raphael climbed across the bridge to another raft, scooped up water from the tank, came back and poured on the fire.
Somewhat later, this experiment was repeated with other chimpanzee monkeys. One of them did not cross the bridge to the other raft. She simply scooped up water from the lake, turned on the fire and took out a banana.
German psychologist V. Koehler(1887-1967) studied how higher primates, apes, overcome a situation where a preliminary action or certain preparation is required to achieve a goal (such problems are similar to arithmetic problems in two actions). For example, a banana was placed at some distance from the monkey's cage. A short stick was placed in the monkey's cage. And a little further away, so that you couldn’t reach it with your paw, a long stick. However, its length was enough to get the coveted banana. Experiments have shown that monkeys quickly find a solution: they use a short stick to get a long one, and then use the latter to get a banana. Moreover, this happens not due to the enumeration of possible options (the so-called trial and error method), but due to the “grasping”, “understanding” of new relationships, the ability to present objects in new combinations to perform new functions. Some of V. Köhler's monkeys even figured out how to insert one short stick into another. If you hang something attractive from the ceiling in the center of the room, and scatter boxes around the room, the monkey will figure out how to place them one on top of the other in order to get the attractive thing.
V. Köhler called this phenomenon “insight” - illumination, and another German psychologist K. Bühler(1879-1963) - “aha-experience”, emphasizing that this happens without reasoning, immediately, suddenly.
By the way, our very smart domestic cats and dogs are not capable of solving such problems. The dog will sit for a long time in front of a piece of meat located at some distance from its cage, but will not “guess” to pull the string to which this meat is tied, and the end of which it can reach with its teeth.
A special form of intellectual behavior in animals is exploratory behavior. For example, scientists have conducted studies many times in which they taught laboratory rats to go through mazes to get food. It turned out that if the animal is hungry, it quickly finds the shortest path to the feeder and runs to it. If hunger is not very strong, then the rat begins to explore the maze in detail. In this case, the rat moves slowly, walks around and sniffs all the nooks and crannies. Moreover, sometimes she “specially” chooses paths at the end of which there is obviously nothing “tasty”, and does not go to the same place twice in a row, but chooses a new path. Experiments on monkeys show that they are willing to perform actions that are quite difficult for them in order to be able to simply look at a toy or what is happening in the laboratory. At first glance, such behavior seems biologically inappropriate and not directly related to the satisfaction of needs. This, however, is not the case. Such behavior is biologically expedient because in real life conditions animals must know what surrounds them and where to find what they need. And for this it is necessary to explore the environment.
“Intelligent” behavior of animals, with all its complexity and versatility, is aimed mainly at solving problems determined by biological expediency and satisfying biologically significant needs. It always has a specific sensory-motor character. In order to establish connections between objects and phenomena (and this is an essential feature of intellectual activity), they need these objects and phenomena to be perceived visually and simultaneously. Animals, even higher ones - monkeys, are not capable of abstraction, generalization, conceptual thinking, or understanding of cause-and-effect relationships hidden from direct perception.
This becomes possible only at the next stage of mental development - consciousness person.
Questions and tasks
1. What forms of animal behavior do these passages describe:
According to the observations of the French biologist Fabre, the sphex wasp pierces the three ganglia 1 of a cricket with its sting, paralyzes it, and then drags it into the burrow. The wasp larva feeds on such a paralyzed but still living cricket. Fabre writes that accuracy, with
" Ganglion - a collection of nerve cells, fibers and accompanying tissue that the wasp finds ganglia in such a way that it seems that they are familiar with the anatomy of insects. But if the antennae of a paralyzed cricket are cut off, the wasp turns out to be completely helpless and makes no attempt to drag it into the hole.
The Austrian ethologist 1 K. Lorenz describes the behavior of tame jackdaws: “One evening, at dusk, I was returning home after swimming in the Danube and, out of habit, hurried to the attic to call the jackdaws and lock them up for the night. Standing on the gutter, I suddenly felt something wet and cold in my trouser pocket, where I had hastily put my black swimming trunks. I pulled them out - and the next moment I was surrounded by a dense cloud of fierce, grinding jackdaws, which rained down a hail of terrible blows on my hand that had broken the law. On the other hand, tame jackdaws never make a grinding sound and do not attack you if you are holding one of their chicks in your hands, which is still naked and therefore does not look black.
A young rat, raised in a laboratory and without access to the materials needed to build a burrow, was given these materials before it was due to give birth. The rat failed to use them and seemed incapable of showing the necessary care for the cubs.
2. Observe your pets or your friends' pets.
Which forms of their behavior would you classify as instinctive, which, in your opinion, are at the stage of skill? What, in your opinion, can be characterized as intellectual behavior? Why?
3. Can the patterns of the psyche identified in experiments on animals be transferred to humans? If yes, to what extent?
4. What mechanism for developing a skill is described by the American writer Mark Twain in the following statement: “A cat, once sitting on a hot stove, will never sit on a hot stove again... And on a cold stove either.”
5. What do you think explains the differences in problem solving between animals and children?
Danish psychologist Buytendijk studied whether animals could make simple inferences. He conducted a series of experiments in which
1 Ethologist- specialist in the study of animal behavior.
2 Lorenz K. King Solomon's ring. - M., 1970. - pp. 155-156. of which the animal had to find bait hidden under one of the opaque cans placed in a row. In the first experiment, the bait was hidden under the first can, in the second - under the second, in the third - under the third, etc., i.e. the bait was under every time next jar in a row. A large number of experiments have been carried out with dogs, cats and monkeys. The results were the same all the time: in the first experiment, the animal found the bait through trial and error, and in subsequent experiments, each time it ran to the jar under which the bait was the last time.
Domestic psychologist A.R. Luria conducted similar experiments with young children who had just learned to speak. It turned out that two or three trials were enough for them to continue to complete the task without errors.
6. Explain the following phenomenon.
It is known that bird migration has been carefully monitored by scientists for many years. It is recorded that during the First World War migratory birds changed their routes, which initially passed over the theater of military operations - in the flat regions of Northern France. After the war, the birds returned to their previous routes.
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