Learning

Learning is a change in behavior that results from experience. Although genetic change allows populations to adapt to their environments across generations, behavioral change allows individual animals to adapt to their environments within a lifetime; learning plays a strong role in this individual adaptation, especially for animals that have long lives and therefore the time to learn. Learning occurs as a result of many types of interactions between animals and their environments. Animals must learn to filter out stimuli that have no important consequences (habituation), while enhancing their responses to highly relevant, often dangerous, stimuli (sensitization). They must learn what behaviors are likely to produce desirable and undesirable consequences (operant conditioning) and what stimuli might be associated with certain conditions or events (classical conditioning). Learning can support very practical activities, such as finding stored food, migrating, and recognizing suitable mates. In social settings, behavioral change can spread throughout a group as a result of observational learning much more quickly than it can as a result of natural selection. Finally, when animals play, they may be engaging in the most far-flung and intriguing type of learning.