The phrase "automatic behaviour" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe actions or responses that occur without conscious thought or intention, often as a result of conditioning or habit.
Example: "The dog exhibited automatic behaviour when it sat down at the sound of the bell, having been trained to do so."
Alternatives: "instinctive response" or "reflexive action".
As the Wikipedia entry reminds us, that's the genre that depicts humans as "vain, irrational, venal, infantile and prone to automatic behaviour".
Larry Towell, working in black and white, remained true to the agency's creed by looking at the numbed, automatic behaviour of people in the streets.
Reality can be further scrambled by short episodes of microsleeps and automatic behaviour, when sufferers continue doing routine tasks even though they have actually fallen asleep for a few seconds.
The curious form of communication is probably not intentional, or consciously understood, but is instead an automatic behaviour that arises from the structure of the brain, said Giorgio Vallortigara, director of the animal cognition and neuroscience lab at the University of Trento.
The pure dispositionalist, Ginsborg argues, cannot distinguish the intelligent use of language from mere parroting or other automatic behaviour.
Some recent research appears to support the notion that smooth pursuit is a relatively automatic behaviour [1], [16].
As Professor Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at the University of Cambridge points out: "We are heavily influenced by automatic behaviours… where the desire for instant gratification far outweighs less assured and more distant rewards".
To a psychologist, lots of human rituals look a lot like the automatic behaviours developed by Skinner's pigeons or Dickinson's rats.
But the 2010 paper ruled out such automatic behaviours as an explanation, they say: the activations persist too long to signify anything other than intent.
Moreover, they always consider biomolecules and their functions as simplified interacting 'black balls' with automatic behaviours.
For example, RAA is self-defined as a theory about reasoned behaviours, not a theory about automatic behaviours.
