Instinct, the inborn complex behavior of a living organism that is not learned. Since the 1910 NY Times article (Studying Instincts of Lower Animals ; Scientists' Tests Show the Cat Has to be Taught to Attack Mice), most scientific journals consider the term outdated although it remains popular among the general public and a number of scientists. Instincts are thought to occur as fixed action patterns. These fixed action patterns are unlearned and inherited. Problems occurred when it was discovered that stimuli can be variable due to imprinting in a sensitive period. An example of this are baby ducks following a man as if it were their mother who later, when they grew up, showed interest in mating with the man. Speculated examples of instinctual fixed action patterns can be observed in the behavior of animals, which perform various activities (sometimes complex) that are believed not to be based upon prior experience, such as reproduction, and feeding among insects. For example, sea turtles hatched on a beach automatically move toward the ocean and honeybees communicate the direction of a food source by dancing, all without formal instruction. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests. Another term for the same concept is innate behavior. Instinctual actions - in contrast to actions based on learning which are served by memory and which provide individually stored successful reactions built upon experience - have no learning curve, they are hard-wired and ready to use without learning, but do depend on maturational processes to appear. Biological predispositions are innate biologically vectored behaviors that can be easily learned. For example in one hour a baby colt can learn to stand, walk, glide, skip, hop and run. Learning is required to fine tune the neurological wiring reflex like behavior. True reflexes can be distinguished from instincts by their seat in the nervous system; reflexes are controlled by spinal or other peripheral ganglia, but instincts are the province of the brain. It is very difficult to separate biological cause from learning effects due to epigenetics. Experience will change gene expression which in some cases can be transmitted as predisposition toward a particular behavior to one's children. The number of genes and their location can change protein production which can be effected by learning and the environment. Changing the environment will change what the gene does in future generations.( The above needs citation and references) Any event that initiates an instinctive behavior is termed a key stimulus (KS) or a releasing stimulus. Key stimuli in turn lead to innate releasing mechanisms (IRM), which in turn produce fixed action patterns (FAP). More than one key stimulus may be needed to trigger a FAP.

For example, sea turtles hatched on a beach automatically move toward the ocean and honeybees communicate the direction of a food source by dancing, all without formal instruction. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests. Another term for the same concept is innate behavior. Instinctual actions - in contrast to actions based on learning which are served by memory and which provide individually stored successful reactions built upon experience - have no learning curve, they are hard-wired and ready to use without learning, but do depend on maturational processes to appear. Biological predispositions are innate biologically vectored behaviors that can be easily learned. The output may vary in the sense that a finch will sing naturally (instinctively), but it will sing a song similar to the songs it has picked up in a sensitive period which explains the different regional accents in the finch songs.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations. Thus the waggle dance is a mechanism whereby successful foragers can recruit other bees in their colony to good locations for collecting various resources. It was once thought that bees had two distinct recruitment dances - round dances and waggle dance - the former for indicating nearby targets and the latter for indicating distant targets, but it is now known that a round dance is simply a waggle dance with a very short waggle run. Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.