Does the Name Pavlov Ring a Bell? Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. Ivan Pavlov is most famous for his demonstrations of classical conditioning. Which household pet did he use for his experiments?

Answer: Dogs

Pavlov noticed that dogs started to salivate when there was a stimulus that they associated with food. In the most famous experiment, Pavlov struck a bell when the dogs were given their food. After a few repetitions, the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with being given their food. The dogs would then start to salivate just on hearing the sound of the bell.

2. Are pigeons smarter than humans? Well, research into the Monty Hall problem would suggest so! You are given three doors and select one. One of the wrong doors is then opened. You then have to choose one of the two remaining doors. What should you do?

Answer: Switch to the other door

Before you shout, "That's complete rubbish!", be aware that this problem has fooled many top mathematicians including the great Paul Erd�s. When you get to choose for a second time, the odds of it being the door that you originally chose are only 1/3, with the odds of it being the other door 2/3. This is all because one of the wrong doors will always be opened, meaning that the odds of your original choice stay the same, and as all probabilities equal 1, the other choice is twice as likely to be correct.

Tests have shown that pigeons learn to switch every time much quicker than most humans.

3. Nikolaas Tinbergen developed the concept of supernormal stimuli. He constructed artificial objects to see how an animal changes its behaviour given a change in variables. One of these experiments involved giving a bird a choice of eggs to sit on. Which of the following eggs would the bird choose?

Answer: The dayglo-bright one with black polkadots

It seems that where birds are concerned, big really is best. They would abandon their own eggs to sit on much more interesting eggs. Apparently they can't tell that there's nothing inside!

Tinbergen also did a lot of work on mating behaviour. Male sticklebacks turn red during the mating season, and show aggression towards any of its rivals. Tinbergen made two models. One was very complex and made to look like a stickleback but did not have any red on its belly. A much simpler model was given a red belly, and it was this one that incited the rage of the stickleback.

4. Edward Thorndike is known for his experiments with cats. He used our furry friends in order to develop his theories on how beings learn things. What was the name of the equipment that he used, in order to observe how an animal's behaviour changes over time?

Answer: Puzzle Box

Thorndike set up a box where the cat needed to activate a trigger in order to get out. When it finally escaped, the amount of time it had taken would be noted. The experiment would then be repeated in order to see whether the length of time that the cat took to escape would decrease, and if so how quickly. Thorndike observed that the cat had a gradual learning curve over time rather than any sudden revelations.

5. Karl Von Frisch is famous for his studies on the behaviour of bees. He constructed a glass honeycomb so that he could observe the activities of the bees from all sides. Von Frisch was then able to determine that the bees could communicate the location of a food source by doing which complex dance?

Answer: Waggle Dance

Bees actually perform two types of dance to indicate the location of food. For places in very close proximity to the hive they use a round dance. For places a little further away they use the waggle dance. The bee walks in a straight line a little way up the hive whilst wiggling its posterior.

It then walks in a semi-circle back to its starting point. It will then repeat the walk, and the other bees soon start to copy it. The length, speed and angle all give out different information so that the rest of the hive can have their feeding frenzy.

6. The mirror test is used as a measure of self-awareness in animals. It involves the animal being marked in some way, and then being put in front of a mirror to see how it reacts. Which is the only bird that has been shown to conclusively pass the mirror test?

Answer: Magpie

The super brainy magpie would quite happily wander around with a sticker under its beak until it saw itself in the mirror. It would then desperately scratch around trying to remove the offending item. One exception to this rule is that the magpie does not notice when the sticker is the same colour as its plumage.

Pigeons have also been known to pass the mirror test, but they need to be trained to do so.

7. Wolfgang Kohler did a lot of work on problem solving abilities in animals. He was the director of a research station on Tenerife during World War I. Which animals did he set up a multitude of experiments for, in order to see how they would adapt to a testing situation?

Answer: Chimpanzees

What won't a chimpanzee do for a banana? In one experiment, Kohler taunted them by putting a bunch of bananas just out of their reach. Fortunately, he gave them lots of different toys that they could use to get to the bananas. After the chimpanzees realised that they could not reach the bunch, they started to look around for things that they could use.

There are some great photographs of chimps climbing poles and stacking boxes in order to reach the elusive fruit.

8. One of the numerous inventions attributed to B.F. Skinner is the operant conditioning chamber. In one test, a rat was placed in the chamber, along with a button to press that would supply food pellets to a food tray. If the rat retrieved the pellet immediately, it would trigger a time penalty where no more pellets would be available. Instead, the rat could learn to repeatedly press the button, so that it could accumulate lots of pellets at once. What is this latter phenomenon known as?

Answer: Operant hoarding

This result is particularly notable, as it contradicted previous findings on the behaviour of rats. Rats were thought to behave impulsively. This had been shown by tests where a rat would choose a small item of food straight away, rather than suffer a delay and be given a much larger piece of food.

The operant conditioning chamber can use things like light, sound and even electric shocks to investigate the behaviour of its captives. The human slot machine can be seen as an extension of the chamber, as it rewards people who choose the correct choice of actions.

9. I often wonder why everyone is so afraid of spiders. Let's be honest, what are they really going to do to you? Well, Mary Cover Jones demonstrated that some fears can be unconditioned. She gave a boy named Peter some of his favourite food in the presence of a terrifying beast. He learned to grow tolerant of the evil doer and eventually progressed to touching it. What was he so scared of?

Answer: A rabbit

To be fair to Peter, there have been some evil rabbits down the line. There was one in the film "Hoodwinked!", and the adorable "Fluffy Bun Bun" in the entertaining computer game "Toonstruck".

So, if I am to cure my myrmecophobia, I need to associate ants with nice things. Oddly enough, spending time in the presence of those six-legged monsters is not my idea of fun. I blame the films "Empire of the Ants" and "Marabunta", as well as the nasty lot that crawled all over my computer at University because I'd not been cleaning up spilt coke. I'm having convulsions just writing this!

10. Konrad Lorenz is often depicted as being followed by a group of young geese. He demonstrated that in the early hours of geese hatching from their eggs, they would latch on to the first moving thing that they saw. First discovered by Douglas Spalding, what is the name for this phenomenon?

Answer: Imprinting

Apparently, when the geese grew up a bit, they also thought that Lorenz was a more appealing mating partner than other geese.

Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1973 along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl Von Frisch for their contributions to the study of animal behaviour.

Source: Author ajwtimperley

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor crisw before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

If it does, then you may well be interested in research into animal behaviour. How much do you know about some of the experiments that have enhanced our understanding of the world's wonderful fauna?

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