Biologists define behavior as the way an organism reacts to changes in its internal condition or external environment. Behaviors are preformed when an animal reacts to a stimulus. Stimuli is any kind of signal that carries information and can be detected. An internal stimulus could be stomach pain when you are hungry. An external stimulus could be your phone ringing. A single specific reaction to a stimulus such as waking up when you hear an alarm is called a response.
Animals can detect many types of stimuli such as light, sound, odors and heat. Not every animal can detect every kind of stimuli and some can detect interesting or odd stimuli such as the earth's magnetic field.
When an animal responds to a stimulus, body systems including the sense organs, nervous system and muscles interact to produce the resultant behavior. Innate behaviors appear in fully functional form the first time they are performed, even though the animal may have had no previous experience with the stimuli to which it responds.
The four major types of learning are habituation, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and insight learning.
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