Lorenz - imprinting

• Lorenz was a ethologist who investigated the mechanisms of imprinting where some animals form an attachment to the first large moving object
• Procedure

  Lorenz used a batch of 12 fertilized goose eggs half attached with their mother in their natural environment and half hatched in a incubator where the first moving object they saw were Lorenz . After hatching the goslings were mixed up and Lorenz recorded their behaviour.
• Findings

  He found that the goslings that had hatched in the incubator had imprinted on Lorenz and followed him . And the control group followed the mother.
• From this he developed a critical period where imprinting takes place which is 12-17 hours after 32 hours the goslings were very unlikely to imprint . If imprinting did not occur in that time chicks did not attach themselves to the mother figure . These bonds are irreversible suggesting that imprinting is biological
• Geese are precocial species born immobile and with their eyes open and therefore born with a innate mechanism to imprint on their caregiver which is essential to allow them to learn survival skills.
• Research support

  One strength of Lorenz’s research is the existence of empirical support for the concept of imprinting. Regolin and Vallortigara (1995) demonstrated this through their study on chicks, which were exposed to a simple moving shape, such as a rectangle or triangle. The chicks imprinted onto the moving shape, and when later presented with a range of shapes, they showed a strong preference for and closely followed the original shape they had imprinted on.
• This supports Lorenz’s view that young animals are born with an innate mechanism that enables them to imprint on moving objects, highlighting the biological basis of imprinting.
• Generalisability to humans

  A limitation of Lorenz’s research is the questionable applicability of his findings and conclusions to complex human behaviours. For example, it is unlikely that goslings following a researcher accurately reflects the emotional connections and reciprocal interactions that characterize human attachments. In humans, attachment is a two-way process, with not only the infant forming an emotional bond with the caregiver, but also the caregiver developing a strong emotional attachment to the child.
• Furthermore, the first moving figure that humans typically see is often a midwife, yet humans do not imprint on them in the way goslings do. This suggests that Lorenz’s ideas cannot be appropriately generalized to humans, particularly as humans are not a precocial species like goslings.