Distinguish behaviours that do not depend on learning, including reflexes, fixed action patterns and maturation.

What this dot point is asking

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience. To show learning has occurred, psychologists must first rule out behaviours that appear regardless of experience. This dot point sets up the rest of Module 2 by drawing that line.

Reflex actions

A reflex is a simple, automatic and involuntary response to a specific stimulus, present from birth. The knee-jerk reflex, the eye-blink to a puff of air, and an infant's grasping reflex are examples. Reflexes are fast because the signal travels through a reflex arc in the spinal cord without needing the brain to decide. They protect the body and require no prior experience.

Fixed action patterns

A fixed action pattern is an innate, stereotyped sequence of behaviour triggered by a specific sign stimulus (releaser) and run to completion once started. Unlike a single reflex, it is a whole chain of actions. A classic example is the greylag goose retrieving an egg that has rolled from the nest: once the goose begins the rolling movement, it completes the sequence even if the egg is removed. Such patterns are species-typical and shaped by evolution rather than learned.

Maturation

Maturation is the orderly, biologically programmed unfolding of behaviour as the body and nervous system grow, on a timetable largely independent of practice. Infants crawl, then stand, then walk in a fixed order, and this progression depends on muscle and neural development rather than on being taught. Gesell's early studies of motor development supported the idea of a maturational sequence. Maturation can set a readiness window: a child cannot be trained to walk before the nervous system is ready, no matter how much practice is given.

Distinguishing innate from learned behaviour

The key test is whether experience is required. Reflexes and fixed action patterns appear without practice and are uniform within a species. Maturational changes follow a growth timetable. Learned behaviours, by contrast, vary with experience, can be acquired or lost, and differ between individuals depending on their history.

In practice the categories interact. Maturation sets the readiness for many learned skills: a child cannot learn to write until fine-motor control has matured, and cannot acquire language until the relevant brain regions are ready. Reflexes can also become the raw material for learning, as when the automatic salivation reflex is harnessed in classical conditioning. Recognising that innate and learned processes work together, rather than as rivals, is exactly the nuance that lifts a TASC answer from a list into an explanation. It also previews the nature versus nurture debate that runs through the developmental and biological topics later in the course.

Putting it together

When the exam describes a behaviour, decide first whether experience was needed. If the response is automatic and universal, it is a reflex or fixed action pattern; if it simply appears as the body matures, it is maturation. Only behaviour that changes with experience belongs to the learning theories you study next. Drawing this distinction clearly is what allows you to claim that a change is genuinely learned.