-
I. Introduction and Background
Page 1
-
II. The Static Model
Pages 2 - 3
-
III. The Dynamic Model
Pages 4 - 5 - 6
-
IV. Future Work
Page 7
-
Figures 1-6
Pages 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13
-
References
Page 14
How can the various hypotheses presented here be tested? Somewhat different techniques are required for the static and dynamic models. Static models may be tested by ethological and lesion techniques; for example, results from the sensory deprivation experiments that I did with Koolhaas in his laboratory in the Netherlands support the hypothesis that there are positive feedback effects from offense motivation to the sensory analyzers for releasing stimuli. When offensive animals were completely deprived of visual, auditory and facial tactile sensations, they began to exhibit motor patterns suggesting that they were attacking an "hallucinated" opponent. They ran across the cage as if approaching a non-existent target; they stood in an offensive upright posture despite having no contact with another animal; and they even leapt into the air and came down with repeated bite-and-kick attacks against an opponent that was nowhere near it. This can be explained if one assumes that in the absence of releasing stimulus inputs into the sensory analyzers, motivating inputs can become activate the sensory analyzers directly and trigger what Lorenz has called "vacuum activity.';
To test the dynamic models it will be necessary to directly record the neuronal activity of the offense motivational system during the course of actual episodes of attack and to measure the temporal effects of alterations in this system. Ethological methods can demonstrate that there are positive feedback ("warm-up" and "priming") effects, negative feedback ("refractory period") and decay or satiation effects (Potegal, 1979) in offense, but the precise timing and underlying mechanisms of these effects can only be investigated with neuronal recording. This is the challenge for future work in the analysis of the offense motivational system.
 |
 |
 |