2) Attachment - Upto and including animal studies

Question 1

Who first investigated animal studies?

Answer 1

Konrad Lorenz
In many animal species, attachments are formed soon after birth. This process was first investigated by Konrad Lorenz who studied animal behaviour.

Lorenz noticed the tendency for new-born animals, such as lambs or chicks, to follow the first large moving object they saw after birth (usually the mother) and to attach themselves to it. Lorenz carried out a series of studies with greylag geese in the 1930s which yielded information.

Question 2

Explain Lorenz (1935) study

Answer 2

A01
Procedure

Lorenz divided a number of fertile goose eggs randomly into two groups. Half were replaced under their mother and allowed to hatch naturally, and the remaining eggs were kept in an incubator until they were ready to hatch. Lorenz ensured that he was the first objects seen by the incubator group when they hatched out of their eggs.

Findings

The newly hatched goslings followed him closely, as if he was their mother, and appeared to have formed a rapid attachment to him. A short time after the geese had hatched, Lorenz put both groups of geese into a container to mix them up and then release them. They rapidly separated, the incubator group running to Lorenz and the normally hatched geese towards their real mother.

Conclusions

Lorenz called the formation of rapid attachments “imprinting”. Imprinting is the tendency to form an attachment to the first large moving object seen after birth. In later studies, Lorenz found that the strongest tendency to imprint takes place between 13 and 16 hours after birds hatch out of the egg. By the time birds reach the age of 32 hours, the tendency to imprint has virtually passed and attachment will not take place. Lorenz argued that the imprinting had to take place within the “window development” which he called a critical period.

Question 3

Which animal was Harlow interested in ?

Answer 3

He became interested in attachment by noticing that baby monkeys, raised in isolation to prevent infection, would cling to the towelling nappies lining their cage, protesting loudly when the soiled cloths were removed for cleaning.

Harlow wondered whether the infant monkeys had become attached to the soft cloths in the absence of their real mother.

Question 4

Explain the Harlow and Harlow study

Answer 4

A01
Procedure

Harlow studied 8 new-born macaque monkeys. They were separated from their biological mothers