How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?

How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?

All organisms have adaptations that help them survive and thrive. Some adaptations are structural. Structural adaptations are physical features of an organism like the bill on a bird or the fur on a bear. Other adaptations are behavioral. Behavioral adaptations are the things organisms do to survive. For example, bird calls and migration are behavioral adaptations.

Adaptations are the result of evolution. Evolution is a change in a species over long periods of time.

Adaptations usually occur because a gene mutates or changes by accident! Some mutations can help an animal or plant survive better than others in the species without the mutation.

How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
For example, imagine a bird species. One day a bird is born with a beak that is longer than the beak of other birds in the species. The longer beak helps the bird catch more food. Because the bird can catch more food, it is healthier than the other birds, lives longer and breeds more. The bird passes the gene for a longer beak on to its offspring. They also live longer and have more offspring and the gene continues to be inherited generation after generation.

Eventually the longer beak can be found in all of the species. This doesn't happen overnight. It takes thousands of years for a mutation to be found in an entire species.

Over time, animals that are better adapted to their environment survive and breed. Animals that are not well adapted to an environment may not survive.

The characteristics that help a species survive in an environment are passed on to future generations. Those characteristics that don't help the species survive slowly disappear.

    Did You Know?

How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
... the largest rodent in North America is the beaver.

... beavers' front teeth grow throughout their lives.

... beaver ponds can improve water quality and provide a water source for other animals.

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How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
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    Nature Files    

How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
Learn more about the adaptations these animals have that help them survive and thrive in their habitats.

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How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
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  • Early Psychology—Structuralism and Functionalism

    Table 1. The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology

    School of psychology

    Description

    Important contributors

    Structuralism

    Uses the method of introspection to identify the basic elements or “structures” of psychological experience

    Wilhelm Wundt, Edward B. Titchener

    Functionalism

    Attempts to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess

    William James

    Psychodynamic

    Focuses on the role of our unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories and our early childhood experiences in determining behavior

    Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Erik Erickson

    Behaviorism

    Based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself

    John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner

    Cognitive

    The study of mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgments

    Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sir Frederic Bartlett, Jean Piaget

    Social-cultural

    The study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior

    Fritz Heider, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter

    Wundt and Structuralism

    How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
    Figure 6. (a) Wilhelm Wundt is credited as one of the founders of psychology. He created the first laboratory for psychological research. (b) This photo shows him seated and surrounded by fellow researchers and equipment in his laboratory in Germany. However, despite his efforts to train individuals in the process of introspection, this process remained highly subjective, and there was very little agreement between individuals. As a result, structuralism fell out of favor with the passing of Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener, in 1927 (Gordon, 1995).

    James and Functionalism

    How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
    Figure 7. William James, shown here in a self-portrait, was the first American psychologist.

    Classical Conditioning and Emotional Responses

    How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
    Figure 8. Ivan Pavlov

    Watson and Behaviorism

    Operant Conditioning and Repeating Actions

    Skinner and Reinforcement

    How mental activities help an organism adapt to its environment?
    Figure 9. B. F. Skinner (1950)

    Positive and negative reinforcement

    Which theory focuses on mental activity?

    Cognitive psychology is an area that focuses on the science of how people think. This branch of psychology explores a wide variety of mental processes, including how people think, use language, attend to information, and perceive their environments.

    Which school of thought in psychology maintains that organisms behave in certain ways because they are reinforced for doing so?

    Psych Chapter 16.

    What is the understanding of a conscious experience through introspection?

    Wundt used introspection (he called it “internal perception”), a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed.

    Which school of thought in psychology tried to explain how specific behaviors and mental processes help a person adapt to the environment?

    Try It.