Practice question · Multiple choice
A gull chick pecks harder at a striped stick than at a realistic model of its parent's head. Tinbergen called this a supernormal stimulus. What modern phenomenon has the same structure?
Hints
- The chick is not confused. Its rule was 'peck at the reddest, longest thing' and the stick wins on the rule's own terms.
- Ask what happens when an industry can manufacture the cue more intensely than nature ever supplied it.
Show the answer
D. Engineered food, concentrated beyond anything ancestral
Why
The releasing mechanism was never tracking parents, it was tracking a cue that reliably meant parent. Exceed the cue and the response exceeds too. A crisp is that stick: it wins on the appetite's own criteria, which is why willpower is the wrong frame for it.
Practise Fixed Action Patterns
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More questions on Fixed Action Patterns
- Sort each behavior by whether it is a Fixed Action Pattern or flexible, learned behavior.
- Select every statement that is TRUE about sign stimuli and supernormal stimuli.
- A goose that has begun the egg-rolling fixed action pattern will stop mid-movement if the egg is taken away.
- A greylag goose whose egg is taken away mid-retrieval finishes the rolling sweep with nothing under her bill.…
- Order the causal chain of a Fixed Action Pattern, from trigger to completion.