Animal Studies - Lorenz

• What is imprinting? 


  Imprinting is reciprocal – even more important the infant imprints a parent
• Aim:

  • Animals not born with ready made image of parents
  • wanted to investigate how they know which animal to follow
• Procedure:

  • Took a clutch of gosling eggs and divided them into 2 groups
  • 1 group with natural mother, 1 group put in an incubator
  • Incubator group -first thing they saw was Lorenz and they started following him about, mother group saw her first.
  • Labelled all of them up, then released them later in the lake
  • 1 group followed mother, incubator group followed Lorenz
• What year did Lorenze do his study?

  1952
• Findings 


  bird species that are mobile from birth attach and follow the first moving object they see. It is important for short-term protection and feeding
• Findings - critical period

  identified a critical period in which imprinting must take place, this can be within a few hours.
• Findings - sexual imprinting

  • It’s important for long term for mating (sexual imprinting)
  • studies have shown mate choice is related to early imprinting choices
• Strength (sexual imprinting) 


  • Guiton (1966) showed chicks could imprint on yellow rubber gloves in his study.
  • He later found males tried to mate with the yellow glove later on (early imprinting is linked to reproductive behaviour).
• Weaknesses 


  • Imprinting is a plastic (flexible) and forgiving mechanism (Hoffman, 1996)
  • Guiton (1966) found that he could reverse the imprinting of the glove on the chicks, if they later spent time with their own species.
  • Now believed imprinting is like any other learning – it can take place rapidly and fairly reversible.
  • Should take caution generalising animal behaviour to human behaviour.
• Findings:

  • a peacock was reared in a reptile house at a zoo
  • After hatching, the first thing it saw was a giant tortoise.
  • As an adult the peacock would only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoise (sexual imprinting)