 the first thing that we're going to look at is a type of reflex called a modal action pattern. So, MAPs are, I'm going to try that again, MAPs are modal action patterns. I personally refer to these things as fixed action patterns because that's the way I learned them. However, people these days tend to, experts in the field, tend to call these modal action patterns for various reasons, all beyond the scope of the course. But we as psychologists like to change things over and over again just to see if anyone's paying attention. So that's what we did. No, it's actually a more accurate reason than that. It's a mode. It's only there for a certain amount of time. Anyway, we'll get there. Similar to basic reflexes, but much more complex. Here's the keys. They occur in a single species or related species. And they occur in nearly all members of that species and they occur to similar stimuli. So, if we put all those stimuli together, blah, blah, blah, all the ones that might elicit this particular modal action pattern. Those things are going to occur in nearly all members of a species. Now, we say on nearly all because we're accurate. You may have some damage or somebody may be born with some damage or born with a mutation and they may not have that particular modal action pattern, or they may not have a hand to cause their modal action pattern to happen. Who knows? So we say nearly all members of a species, the response is going to look the same across those species and it will even look the same across similar species. So if we're talking about us, we'll probably see similar modal action patterns and other higher primates and so on and so forth. Get the idea. Ha! Here's the cool part. These change depending on the state of the organism. Depending on things about the organism, a certain map may be present or a map may not be present. The male stickleback fish is a great example, although at the moment of this recording, I am completely blanking out on the example, although it is in your textbook. I do promise you that. I remember reading it last night. I just don't remember what it said that happens. It has to do, I think the male stickleback example has to do with mating behavior and a couple of things along those lines. It has to, the organism has to be in a certain state. It has to be in a certain state of development as well. These things are usually only open for certain windows. They're only available for certain times during the organism's development, meaning the window thing. It might be there. You might have modal action pattern for six months or a year, or it'll go away. That's one of the criteria. We're getting into that though. Here's an example of one. The feeding behavior of a herring gold. There's a little chick. I want you to notice the red dot. Look at the red dot on the bird's beak. Then look at the little chick. Well, the little chick sees that little red dot and that causes a modal action pattern to activate. Once that modal action pattern activates, the modal action pattern is this. It comes up and it pecks that red dot. The pecking of the red dot. When the parent in the parent goal receives that little tick, tick, tick, tick on the dot, then what happens is it causes a modal action pattern in that critter. That one then goes, and it regurgitates its food back to the little baby. You've got two maps. They're working together. Adult herring goals do not pack other adult herring goals. The point being when they see the little red dot, so the point being that these things go away. They're only there for a certain amount of time. Multiple maps working together. The chick pecks. The parent regurgitates what invokes the pecking. Interesting question. Probably some sort of stimulus. That would be the red, and that's the point. Let's see if I've got that in the next. So, the red dot is what I told you is what's going on. I told you on this slide that it was the red dot that causes it. Yes, it is, but there's more detail because we're experimentalists. We'd like to study this stuff. Here it is. All right. For the herring goals, the long, thin, moving object pointed downward with a constraining. That's great. Good job reading. Well done. A contrasting red patch at the tip. Other stimuli were irrelevant. How did we figure this out? Well, experimenters are experimenters. We took pieces of wood, colored them yellow, and pointed downward like the tip of the beak, and put a little big red dot on the bottom of it, and see if that would initiate the modal action pattern in the chicks, and I'll be darned if it doesn't. So, then they varied that a lot to the point where they figured out what stimuli it was that was important, and it was the stimuli that were listed in the point above that one. So, it has to be long. It's got to be long. It's got to be thin. It's got to be moving. Now, it's got to be pointed downward, which makes sense. It's pointed downward because that's the bottom of the, you couldn't see that, the bottom of the beak there is pointed slightly downward. It has to have a red patch, and it doesn't matter. Anything else doesn't matter. As long as you've got that, you can initiate that modal action pattern in the herring gold chick. It sounds a little weird, but it works. That's the nature of reflexes, is that if you get the stimulus right, you can produce the reflex. It doesn't have to be an exact copy of what it's originally tied into. It doesn't have to be an exact copy of the beak. It's just something close enough. So, we've explored what those are. Sign stimuli. I'm trying to think if we want to cover that one too much. I don't want to cover that too much in here. I can talk about it for days. So, read your book on the sign stimuli stuff. I'm talking about what that really means and how it's a particular signal. Super normal stimulus. It's kind of fun to talk about. Basically, if I put this herring gold next to its chick, and then I take a bigger homemade fake beak, as long as it's bigger and more intense and more contrasting and brighter red, you're getting the idea here. Then the original parent's beak, then what's going to happen is the chick will go after that one, the fake one, rather than the big one. There's some other examples in your textbook as well about super normal stimuli. There's some fun videos that you might be able to catch online. But one of the classic examples is the traditional egg rag from a bird. Of course, they incubate that egg. Well, if you take a bigger egg, painted the same as this one as the original egg, even though it's fake, it's made out of wood or plastic or whatever, then the parent bird will sit on top of it and try to incubate it. Because the egg itself and the visual stimulus of the egg produces a modal action pattern. So much for parenting instinct. In that case, it is simply a reflex. So the reflex happens. In this case, if you use a stimulus that's more intense, super normal as you will, then that will cause the modal reaction pattern as well, but it will cause it to go towards that particular stimulus, not its own egg. It will sit there and cover up a wooden egg forever, basically, until you take it away. It's kind of weird, but we had to figure it out somehow. So that's how we did it. Humans have these too. Now, I'm going to warn you, right now, before I go any further, this is a graphic image. If you do not want to see a graphic image, and I don't mean sexually graphic, I mean, this is visually graphic in terms of what it represents and where the photo was taken and things. So if you don't want to see that, skip this slide and just know that PTSD is there's an argument that maybe PTSD is a modal action pattern. There are lots of modal action patterns in humans, specifically, you know, the rooting reflex, if I do this, and the baby turns towards that, and then in an infant mind yourself, I do this, and the baby turns towards that. That's a rooting reflex. You have the grasping reflex on an infant. So if I touch the hand on an infant, they grasp. So that's the grasping reflex. Those are modal action patterns. There's some others, but those are some important ones. Language development may be a modal action pattern. We're not sure yet because there seems to be certain windows where you're hypersensitive to learning language or where humans are hypersensitive to that. So that might be a modal action pattern. They're not completely sure. That would kind of resolve, that would partially resolve the Skinner versus Chomsky debate if you're familiar with that. That's kind of one of the ways that some people have tried to reconcile those folks. Anyway, PTSD is another one. So here we go. All right, you don't have to continue past this point. Here's the here's the nasty picture. And just fast forward until the picture's gone. There's no gross detail in close, but it's kind of sad picture. So here you go. Buddy of mine was in Afghanistan. And he was a kind of a correspondent. He was a reporter and he was taking pictures. And this is a forward operating base out in eastern Afghanistan. And this is what an IED does, folks. These are not little cute little bombs that blow up, that blow up mailboxes and stuff. No, they blow up cars. And this is a Humvee. And this is an up armored Humvee. So that glass that you see down there, the upside down thing in the glass, that's like two inch thick or one inch thick glass is bulletproof glass. This thing is up armored. This is a majorly hardcore vehicle. And it hit one IED. Several people died in this. As you can see, at least one guy survived. I think three soldiers died. Four soldiers died in this particular accident, in this particular attack. The guy that took the picture was there at the time, a convoy type thing. And boom, he hit. And this one obviously took the picture. This picture was refused to be published in quite a few different organizations that US government said no, we don't want to demonstrate what actually happens to our troops over there, quite literally. So it's kind of sad. But I have it here because of the fact that nearly every member of our species respond, not all of them, but most of us respond similarly to these extremely traumatic events. And those responses look the same. And they look like post-traumatic stress disorder. So it's possible, not sure yet, and it's kind of a guess, but it's possible that PTSD is a model action pattern. Now, classes of stimuli kind of fits. Anything majorly traumatic, it could be an event like this, it could be something else. There's all sorts of things that it could be, right? How about other species? Well, I'm trying to get you the criteria here for model action patterns, right? So other species, well, dogs display PTSD type behavior. When they go through war actions and things like that, they end up burning out, if you will, and looking depressed and engaging in similar behaviors that humans engage in. So maybe it is a model action pattern. We're not sure. It would sure help if we knew a little bit, because then we could kind of focus our treatments on those types of things, and we could understand when this is going to happen. We can't really stop a model action pattern, but you might be able to understand a bit more about it. So anyway, that's enough of those. Let's move on. Talk about something slightly different.