Animal studies

• What is one animal study?

  Lorenz (1952)- Imprinting and Sexual imprinting
• Describe the procedure of imprinting experiment- Lorenz (1952) 


  Procedure- Randomly divided goose eggs. Half the eggs hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment. The other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz. 
• Describe the findings of imprinting experiment- Lorenz (1952)

  Findings- The incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere, whereas the control group followed the mother everywhere. This is called imprinting. Lorenz identified a critical period- in some species just a few hours after hatching.  
• Describe the findings of sexual imprinting by Lorenz (1952)


  Lorenz investigated the relationship between imprinting and adult mate preferences. He observed that birds that imprinted on humans would later display courtship to them. Case study- he described a peacock who had been reared in a reptile zoo where the first thing it saw was tortoise. As an adult the peacock would only court tortoises.  
• Strength and limitations of Lorenz (1952) research

  + Regolin and Vallortigara (1995) is supporting research. Chicks were exposed to simple shape combinations that moved. A range of simple shape combinations were then moved in front of them and they followed the original more closely. This supports that young animals are born with the innate mechanism to imprint during critical period. 

  -Inability to generalise findings and conclusions from birds to humans 
• What is one animal study?

  Harlow (1958)- Importance of contact comfort, Maternally deprived monkeys as adults
• Describe the procedure of the experiment for the importance of contact comfort

  Newborns kept alone died but with soft cloth it survived 

  Procedure- Harlow (1958) tested the idea that a soft object serves like a mother. In one experiment he reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model mothers. In one condition, milk was dispensed by the plain wire mother whereas in a second condition the milk was dispensed by the cloth mother 
• Describe the findings of the experiment for the importance of contact comfort

  Findings- The baby monkeys cuddled the cloth mother in preference to plain wire mother and sought comfort from the cloth mother when frightened regardless which one dispensed milk. This showed that contact comfort was of more importance than food.  
• Describe what Harlow (1958) saw in maternally deprived monkeys

  Maternally deprived monkeys as adults- Harlow followed the monkeys into adulthood who had been maternally deprived. The monkeys reared with the plain wire mothers were the most dysfunctional. But the cloth mother ones also did not develop normally. They became more aggressive, less sociable and bred less than normal monkeys. When they became mothers, some of the monkeys neglected their young.  
• Describe the strengths and limitations to Harlow's (1958) study

  + Real world applications. Ex. Baby monkeys in zoos 

  -- Inability to generalise findings from monkeys to birds