Lorenz’s Geese

• Imprinting

  Lorenz observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child and a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling that then followed him around.
• Lorenz set up a classic experiment in which he randomly divided a large clutch of goose eggs. Half of the eggs were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment and the other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz.
• The incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group followed their mother. When the two groups were mixed up, the control group followed their mother and the other followed Lorenz. Imprinting is when a bird species that are mobile from birth attach to & follow the first moving object they see. Lorenz identified that the first few hours after hatching is a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place, it not the chicks can’t attach themselves to a mother figure.
• Sexual imprinting

  Lorenz also investigated the relationships between imprinting and adult male preferences. He observed that birds that imprinted on a human would often later display courtship behaviour towards humans. In a case study, Lorenz described a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first moving objects the peacock saw after hatching were giant turtles. In adulthood the peacock could only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises. Lorenz said this meant the peacock had undergone sexual imprinting.
• Research support

  + One strength of Lorenz’s research is the existence of support for the concept of imprinting. A study by Regolin & Vallartigara supports Lorenz's Idea of imprinting. Chicks were shown simple shape combinations that moved. A range of shape combinations were then moved in front of them and they followed the original mast closely. This supports the view that young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present in the critical window of development.
• Generalisability to humans

  -One limilation of Lorenz's studies is the ability to generalise findings & conclusions from birds to humans. The mammalian attachment system is quite different and more complex than that in birds. In mammals, attachment is a two-way process so the mother becomes attached to the young and the young becomes attached to the mother. This means that it is probably not appropriate to generalise Lorenz's ideas to humans.