lorenz

• What did Lorenz investigate?

  - Lorenz's research explores the evolutionary explanation of attachment, proposing infants are pre-programmed to form attachments soon after birth.

  - Lorenz's findings support the concept of an attachment gene, emphasizing the imprinting on a caregiver shortly after birth.
• Outline Lorenz's animal study into attachment (imprinting) - detailed (A01 question only)

  Aim:- investigate the mechanisms of imprinting,

  where youngsters form an attachment to the first large, moving object they encounter.

  Procedure: LAB EXPERIMENT- Lorenz (1935) randomly split a clutch of goose eggs into two batches.

  - one batch hatched naturally with the mother,

  the other in an incubator with Lorenz as the first moving object they encountered.
• Outline Lorenz's animal study into attachment (imprinting) findings + conclusions - detailed (A01 question only)

  Findings:-naturally hatched goslings followed their mother, while incubator hatched goslings followed Lorenz.

  - upon release from the box, naturally hatched goslings went to their mother; incubator hatched goslings went to Lorenz, showing no bond to their natural mother.

  - bonds were irreversible; naturally hatched goslings followed only their mother, incubator hatched goslings followed only Lorenz.

  - imprinting occurred within a short period (4-25 hours) after birth.
• What is sexual imprinting?

  - Lorenz studied the link between imprinting and adult mate preferences, discovering that birds imprinting on a human preferred human courtship later.- adult birds seek to mate with whatever species or object they imprinted on.e.g Guitton et al
• conclusion of Lorenz study 


  CONCLUSION: Lorenz called this imprinting and he suggested that there was a critical period of a few hours depending on the species and if imprinting does not occur then the chicks do not attach to the mother figure.
• research support - Lorenz 


  P: strength - evidence to support imprinting

  E: chicks exposed to moving shape combinations like triangles with squares in front

  E: A range of different moving shape combinations were shown but chicks followed the original most closely

  L: therefore suggests animals born with innate mechanisms to imprint
• generalizability to human - lorenz 


  P: limitation - difficult to generalize findings to humans

  E: mammalian attachment system different to those of animals

  E: mammalian attachment system two-way process - both young and mothers show emotional attachment

  L: therefore not appropriate to generalise Lorenz's findings to humans