animal studies

• what did lorenz do?

  took a clutch of gosling eggs and divided them into two groups. one group was left with natural mother and the others were placed in an incubator. the incubated eggs saw lorenz as the first living thing they saw. lorenz marked each group separately and placed them together with both him and their natural mother present
• what was lorenz’s aim?

  to test imprinting - an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother which takes place during a specific time in development, probably the first few hours after birth/hatching. if it doesn’t happen at this time it probably will not happen
• what did lorenz find?

  the goslings divided themselves up into their groups and those imprinted on lorenz did not show recognition of their biological mother
• what is the research support of lorenz?

  guiton - loeghorn chicks exposed to yellow rubber gloves for feeding in the 1st weeks imprinted on the gloves. supports the view that young animals are not born with a predisposition to imprint on a specific type of object but probably on any moving thing present during the critical window of development
• what are the criticisms of imprinting?

  guiton et al (1966) found that chickens that imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would try to mate with them as adults (as lorenz predicted) but in the end they found that with experience they eventually learned to prefer mating with other chickens. suggests the impact of imprinting on mating behaviour is not as permanent as lorenz believed
• what did harlow do?


  harlow created two wire mothers each with a different ‘head’. one of the mothers were wrapped in soft cloth. eight infant rhesus monkeys were studied for 165 days. for four monkeys the milk was on the cloth mother and the rest had it on the wire mother. observations were made about the time each infant spent with each mother
• what did harlow find?

  all eight monkeys spent most time with the cloth mother even if the wire mother had the milk. those monkeys who had to get milk from the wire mother only spent their time feeding with it. when frightened, all of the monkeys clung to the cloth mother. these findings suggest that infants form attachment based on comfort, not food
• what is the confounding variable of harlow’s experiment?

  2 stimulus objects varied in more ways than just being cloth covered or not. the heads of the 2 mothers were also different. the different heads may be responsible for the preference (cloth mother had a more attractive head). conclusions lack internal validity
• what is the problem of extrapolation in harlow’s experiment?

  study focused on monkeys. results have been applied to humans. monkeys are not representative of humans and the attachments might differ between the species
• what are the ethics of harlow’s experiment?

  monkeys suffered greatly. separation of baby monkeys caused stress. harm was long term as the effects were carried into adulthood. but, now we know that comfort is key and we have learnt lots about attachment