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PubMed1992

History of developmental neuroethology: early contributions from ethology.

Ethology has its roots in the natural history of animal behavior. Questions of causation and function have historically been complementary, and each has rested upon a prior appreciation of the behavior of animals in nature. It is thus difficult to place a single time or place where ethology was born. Early evolutionary interests hinted at developmental constraints that continue to guide much research. It has only been relatively recently, however, that the explicit analysis of neural mechanisms in behavior has received the attention it deserves in developmental analyses. A mature developmental neuroethology will require a synthesis of the broad insights of ethology with refined neurobiological technique. Fundamental, however, is the primary focus upon behavior as it normally occurs.

Animals↗
PubMed1992

Mechanics of the animate.

Behavior is treated as basic physics. Dimensions are identified and their transformations from physical specification to axes in behavioral space are suggested. Responses are treated as action patterns arrayed along a continuum of activation energy. Behavior is seen as movement along a trajectory through this behavior space. Incentives or reinforcers are attractors in behavior space, at the centers of basins of lowered potential. Trajectories impinging on such basins may be captured; repeated capture will warp the trajectory toward a geodesic, a process called conditioning. Conditioning is enhanced by contiguity, the proximity between the measured behavior and the incentive at the end of the trajectory, and by contingency, the depth of the trajectory below the average level of the potential energy landscape. Motivation is seen as the potential of an organism for motion under the forces impinging on it. Degree of motivation is characterized by the depth of the potential field, with low motivation corresponding to a flat field and a flat gradient of activation energy. Drives are the forces of incentives propagated through behavior space. Different laws for the attenuation of drive with behavioral distance are discussed, as is the dynamics of action. The basic postulate of behavior mechanics is incentive-tracking in behavior space, the energy for which is provided by decreases in potential. The relation of temporal gradients to response differentiation and temporal discrimination is analyzed. Various two-body problems are sketched to illustrate the application of these ideas to association, choice, scalar timing, self-control, and freedom.

Animals↗
PubMed1975

Reinforcement schedules and extrapolations to humans from animals in behavioral pharmacology.

Behavior controlled by various schedules of reinforcement is useful for characterizing drugs as well as for analyzing the mechanisms of action of their effects on behavior. Conditioned avoidance techniques have been useful for studying neuroleptics and for predicting their clinical antipsychotic acitivity; the possible involvement of dopaminergic mechanisms in the effect of neurolpetics on avoidance behavior is discussed. Tricyclic antidepressant agents have been studied in assays involving interactions with other agents, such as cocaine, amphetamine and tetrabenazine. One type of operant behavior, Sidman avoidance, has been used as particularly sensitive assay for such drug interactions. Another schedule, in which "observing" responses in pigeons are measured. seems to provide a method for studying antidepressants without involving drug interaction phenomena. For tricyclic compounds, facilitation of observing responses and weak potency of conditioned avoidance inhibition constitute a pharmacological profile that seems to have some predictive value for clinical imipramine-like antidepressant activity. "Conflict (punishment) schedules have been useful for predicting antianxiety activity in man. Although the degree of anticonflict effect observed is consistent with Dew's rate dependency hypothesis, this principle does not fully account for the observed drug effects. In the conflict model, the actions of benzodiazepines differ in drug-naive versus drug-experienced animals. Experiments with parachlorophenylalnine have not yet provided clear support for the postulated role of serotonin in related phenomena.

Animals↗
PubMed1992

Behavioral effects of atriopeptin in rats.

High densities of atriopeptin-immunoreactive fibers and of highly specific and selective atriopeptin receptor sites are present in brain areas involved in animal behavior. The possible influence of these peptides on behavior was thus investigated in adult rats. The intracerebroventricular injection of atriopeptin II modified male sexual behavior (reduction in mount latency) at the dose of 5 micrograms/animal; lower and higher doses were ineffective. Open-field behavior was also modified by i.c.v. atriopeptin II at the doses of 5 and 10 micrograms/rat, which induced an increase in the number of external and internal crossings and of external rearings. Finally, in fasted rats, atriopeptin II, at the dose of 10 micrograms/rat, significantly increased the amount of food intake 30 and 60 min after injection. These findings indicate that atriopeptins may modify different animal behaviors.

Animals↗
PubMed1975

Does increasing stress change the behavioral action of mescaline from disruption to facilitation?

This experiment is related to the hypothesis of Bridger and of Wray that hallucinogens have facilitatory effects on animal behavior when stress is part of the experiment and have disruptive effects otherwise. Male Long-Evans rats were trained to high (above 89%), stable base line rates of shuttlebox avoidance, then given each of four treatments at 6-day intervals after returning to base line avoidance rates: 1. saline (1 ml i.p.), 2. saline+stressor, 3. mescaline hydrochloride (36.6 mg/kg i.p.), 4. mescaline (39.6 mg/kg i.p.)+stressor. Stress treatment was 1.0 mA footshock (1 sec duration) every 20-30 sec for 15 min between injection and session. Sessions (100 trials) began 20 min after injection. Treatments 1 and 2 had no effect on avoidance rate. Treatments 3 and 4 significantly decreased avoidance rate, with the latter causing significantly more decrease than the former. None of the treatments affected presession (5 min adaptation period) or intertrial crossings of the shuttlebox or latency on escape trials. These results suggest that exposure to a stressor, per se, is not the crucial factor causing hallucinogens to have facilitatory effects on animal behavior.

Adaptation, Psychological↗