Lorenz- Imprinting
- Created by: MollyL20
- Created on: 30-10-20 15:21
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- Animal studies- Lorenz's research
- In the early 20th century a number of ethologists were conducting animal studies of the relationships between infant animals and their mothers.
- Their observations informed the psychologists understanding of mother infant attachments in humans
- Lorenz first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child
- Methods
- Lorenz set up a classic experiment in which he randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs
- Half of these eggs were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment
- The other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving thing was Lorenz
- Findings
- The incubator group followed Lorenz and the control group followed their mother
- When the groups were mixed, the control group continued to follow their mother and the other following Lorenz
- Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place which can be even just a few hours after the eggs have hatched
- If imprinting doesn't occur, he found that chicks don't imprint themselves to a mother figure
- Sexual imprinting
- He also investigated the relationship between imprinting and adult mate preferences
- He observed that birds imprint on human would often later display courtship behaviour towards humans
- Lorenz described a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first moving object the peacocks saw after hatching was the giant tortoises
- As an adult, this bird would only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises. He concluded that this meant he had undergone sexual imprinting
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