lorenz

• Imprinting

  Lorenz 1952 first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling that then followed him around.
• Procedures

  He created two conditions. The control condition was that the geese were hatched in the normal environment with their mother. The experimental condition was that the geese were hatched in an incubator; their first moving object was Lorenz himself.
• Findings

  The incubator group followed Lorenz and the group that was born in their natural environment followed the mother, and he even mixed all the geese together and they still followed their first moving object. He found that geese have a critical period for attachment which is a few hours after hatching and if they don't attach to something within those hours then they will not attach.
• Sexual imprinting

  If the ducks imprinted on lorenz then they became sexually attracted to humans and would try to pursue courtship with them. But if they imprinted on their mother then they were sexually attracted to geese.
• Strength is the existence of research support for imprinting. Regolian and Vallortigara 1995 supports Lorenz’s research. Chicks were exposed to simple shape combinations that moved such as a rectangle and triangle. A range of shape combinations were shown to them and they followed the original most closely. This supports the view that young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object in the critical window for development as predicted by Lorenz’s research. 
• Limitation is that you are unable to generalise the findings and conclusions from birds to humans. The mammalian attachment system is quite different and complex to that in birds. For example mammals attach in a two-way process so it is not just the young who become attached it is the mother as well as they show an emotional attachment to their mothers. This means that it is probably not appropriate to generalise this from birds to humans.
• Although human attachment is very different from that in birds there have been attempts to use the idea of imprinting to explain human behaviour. Seebach 2005 suggested that computer users exhibit baby duck syndrome which is the attachment formed to their first computing operating system leading them to reject others.