Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift, also called instinctual drift, is the tendency of a trained animal to revert to automatic, inborn species-typical behaviors that can undermine a learned response from operant conditioning. Keller and Marian Breland, former students of B. F. Skinner who trained animals commercially, coined the term after repeatedly watching conditioned behaviors erode into natural instincts, describing it as a clear and utter failure of conditioning theory. A raccoon trained to drop a coin into a container, for example, would instead rub the coin between its paws as though washing food, because that innate food-handling behavior gradually overrode the trained action even though it interfered with earning the reward. The phenomenon shows that a learned response can be pulled back toward an animal evolved instincts over time rather than remaining fixed by reinforcement alone. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/