Practice question · Select all that apply
Select every statement that is TRUE about sign stimuli and supernormal stimuli.
Hints
- Two options are misconceptions - one about what 'supernormal' means, one about whether FAPs are learned.
- Supernormal means EXAGGERATED beyond nature, and FAPs are innate, not reinforced.
Show the answer
- A. Birds will sometimes prefer incubating an oversized fake egg over their own.
- B. A sign stimulus can be a single feature (like the color red), not the whole realistic object.
- D. An exaggerated cue can out-compete the real object for the releasing mechanism's response.
Why
Exaggerated cues out-competing reality, a single feature serving as the trigger, and preferring an oversized egg are all true. A supernormal stimulus is exaggerated (not merely realistic), and a FAP is innate rather than reinforced - so those two are false.
Practise Fixed Action Patterns
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Fixed Action Patterns
- Sort each behavior by whether it is a Fixed Action Pattern or flexible, learned behavior.
- A gull chick pecks harder at a striped stick than at a realistic model of its parent's head. Tinbergen called…
- 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.