PHYSORG
It’s easy to guess why it doesn’t take long to learn to avoid certain behaviors and embrace others. But how do we know what drives these predilections? A study led by Aimee Dunlap at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and co-authored by University of Minnesota researcher David Stephens, offers insight into the evolutionary underpinning of animals’ innate ability to quickly absorb critical life lessons.
Animals are flooded with stimuli, but survival often depends on their ability to form specific associations that enhance fitness while ignoring others entirely. Psychologists have a name for it: the Garcia Effect. In the 1960s, John Garcia showed that rats are primed to learn certain associations (taste and illness) and not others (light and illness).
“Different learning abilities evolved in different environments, and we had a hypothesis about how that should happen,” says Stephens. “What we wanted to know the general properties that cause natural selection to favor some learned associations over others.”
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