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Related Concept Videos

Optimal Foraging00:48

Optimal Foraging

How animals obtain and eat their food is called foraging behavior. Foraging can include searching for plants and hunting for prey and depends on the species and environment.
What is Behavior?00:54

What is Behavior?

Behaviors are actions that an organism engages in—they can be related to finding food, reproducing, defending against threats, and many other possible actions. Behaviors include activities related to the environment around the animal—such as migration—as well as social interactions within a species or population. Many behaviors involve motor output—that is, muscle movements—while others involve less visible actions, such as learning.
Cognitive Learning01:21

Cognitive Learning

Cognitive learning is based on purposive behavior, incidental learning, and insight learning.
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...
Instinctive Drift01:05

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...
Avoidance Learning and Learned Helplessness01:14

Avoidance Learning and Learned Helplessness

Avoidance learning and learned helplessness are critical concepts in understanding behavioral responses to negative stimuli.
Avoidance learning occurs when an organism learns that a specific behavior can prevent an unpleasant outcome. For example, a student who receives a bad grade may start studying harder to avoid future poor grades. This behavior persists even when the negative outcome is no longer present. Avoidance learning is powerful because it maintains behavior in the absence of the...
Observational Learning01:12

Observational Learning

Albert Bandura's observational learning, also known as imitation or modeling, occurs when a person observes and imitates another's behavior. It is a quicker process than operant conditioning. A well-known example is the Bobo doll study, where children who saw an adult acting aggressively towards the doll were more likely to act aggressively when left alone, compared to those who observed a nonaggressive adult. Many psychologists view observational learning as a form of latent learning because...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Appetitive Associative Olfactory Learning in Drosophila Larvae
09:22

Appetitive Associative Olfactory Learning in Drosophila Larvae

Published on: February 18, 2013

Quantifying the adaptive value of learning in foraging behavior.

Sigrunn Eliassen1, Christian Jørgensen, Marc Mangel

  • 1Department of Biology, University of Bergen, P.O. Box 7803, N-5020 Bergen, Norway. sigrunn.eliassen@bio.uib.no

The American Naturalist
|August 22, 2009
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Learning foraging strategies are most efficient with reliable patch quality estimates and stable environments. However, the value of learning increases with environmental change and variability, requiring flexible strategies to adapt.

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Foraging Path-length Protocol for Drosophila melanogaster Larvae
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Foraging Path-length Protocol for Drosophila melanogaster Larvae

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Last Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Appetitive Associative Olfactory Learning in Drosophila Larvae
09:22

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Published on: February 18, 2013

Foraging Path-length Protocol for Drosophila melanogaster Larvae
07:26

Foraging Path-length Protocol for Drosophila melanogaster Larvae

Published on: April 23, 2016

Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Behavioral Ecology

Background:

  • Foraging animals often encounter patchy resources.
  • Learning from past experiences in resource patches can inform future behavior.
  • Environmental information acquisition has costs and benefits.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To model the evolution of learning strategies in foragers.
  • To compare learning strategies with fixed rules and perfect information.
  • To analyze the influence of spatial and temporal heterogeneity on learning.

Main Methods:

  • Ecological modeling of foraging behavior.
  • Comparison of learning strategies against fixed patch-leaving rules.
  • Simulation of foragers with perfect environmental information.

Main Results:

  • Learning efficiency is highest with low stochasticity, minimal temporal change, and low spatial variability.
  • The value of learning is greatest with temporal and spatial heterogeneity, enabling adaptation.
  • Short-term memory learning benefits accurate, temporally changing environments; slow updates suit spatial variability.

Conclusions:

  • Learning strategies offer adaptive advantages in variable environments, despite potential efficiency trade-offs.
  • The optimal learning rule depends on the specific environmental conditions (stochasticity, heterogeneity).
  • Environmental predictability influences the evolution and utility of different learning mechanisms in foragers.