Lesson 10 Lorenz Flashcards
Who was Lorenz?
He was an ethologist and he wanted to investigate imprinting. This was the instinct in several species of animal that attach to the first moving thing they see after being born
What was the procedure?
Lorenz took a bunch of gosling eggs and divided them into two groups. One group to be left with their mother, another to be incubated. Once hatched from incubator, the first thing they see is Lorenz. Lorenz marked the two groups to distinguish between them and then placed them all together again
What were the findings of Lorenz
The gosling divided up quickly. One group following their natural mother, and the others following Lorenz (incubated eggs). The incubated ones showed no recognition of their natural mother
Lorenz found imprinting is restricted to a very definite period of a young animals life. This is the critical period. If a young animal is not exposed to a moving object during this critical period, then an animal will not imprint. Animals imprint on consistently moving animals for the first 2 days. Imprinting is similar to attachment as it binds animal and caregiver in a special relationship. Lorenz still had to teach the goslings how to swim and they would always return to him when he called
What are the long term effects of imprinting?
The process is irreversible and long lasting. One of the geese Imprinted on Lorenz, called martina, would sleep on his bed every night
Lorenz also discovered that early imprinting had an effect on later mate preferences, called sexual imprinting. Animals, especially birds, would choose to made with the same kind of object up which they were imprinted
What is the evaluation of Lorenz?
+ Other studies support the idea that animals are born with an instinct to
attach to the first moving object they see. Guiton (1966) demonstrated that
chickens exposed to yellow rubber gloves during feeding in their first few
weeks of life imprinted on the gloves.
- Imprinting is more reversible than Lorenz thought. Guiton (1966) found that he could reverse the imprinting in chickens that had initially tried to mate with the yellow rubber gloves. After spending time with their own species they were able to engage in normal sexual behaviour with other chickens.
- Lorenz was interested in imprinting in birds, and thus there is a problem of generalising from birds to humans as it seems that mammalian attachment system is quite different from birds – for example, mammalian mothers show more emotional attachment to young than do birds, and mammals may be able to form attachments at any time rather than a specific critical period (although this has been debated).
Evaluation points from Harlow can be applied to here as well
Ethics…
