Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 79

The most common outcome in a conflict situation is that the behavior system with the highest level of causal factors will be expressed and all the other systems will be suppressed. A male stickleback that is foraging in its territory will stop foraging when a female enters and will begin courting. The male’s hunger has not changed, nor has the availability of food. It follows that the activation of the systems responsible for courtship must have inhibited the feeding system. In general, behavior system inhibition can be said to occur when causal factors are present that are normally sufficient to elicit a certain kind of behavior, but the behavior does not appear as a result of the presence of causal factors for another kind of behavior.

Sometimes, inhibition of a behavior system is not complete, and incipient movements belonging to the suppressed behavior systems are seen. These provide an indication of the relative strength of the causal factors for other behaviors that are activated in the situation. They have been called intention movements because they suggest to an observer, human or conspecific, what behavior might occur next. Intention movements have played an important role in theories of the evolution of motor mechanisms (Tinbergen 1952).