Before the child is weaned, the mother’s whole interest is centred on him. She never leaves him, carries him on her back-often in skin-to-skin contact-wherever she goes, sleeps with him, feeds him on demand at all hours of the day and night, forbids him nothing, and never chides him. … He is, moreover, continually being stimulated by seeing her at her various occupations and hearing her interminable conversations, and because he is always with her, his world is relatively extensive. He is also the centre of interest for neighbors and visitors.
The first systematic investigations on imprinting were published in 1951. Independently, in this country and in Europe, the work of scientists gave the first indications of some of the important factors in the process. Most of Ramsay’s experiments dealt with exchange of parents and young, although he also imprinted some waterfowl on such objects as a football or a green box. . . .
Our birds (ducks and chicks) were incubated and hatched right in our laboratory. They hatched in the dark, and each animal was placed in an individual box marked with the exact hour at which the animal hatched. The bird, in the box, was kept in a still-air incubator and kept there until it was to be imprinted. After the animal had undergone the imprinting experience, it was returned to the box and kept there until testing. Only after testing was completed was the young bird placed in day light and given food and water.
Although the intensive effort to find and formulate laws of learning (in hopes of accounting for the causal bases of all behaviors) did show that certain behaviors once thought to be instinctive were indeed modifiable by learning, the realization is growing that there are still certain behaviors that are so persistent in character and resistant to modification by reinforcement that they cannot be satisfactorily explained by conventional laws of learning. In such cases, and imprinting is one of them, other explanatory devices must be constructed. He was the first to bring widespread attention to this phenomenon of imprinting, and he gave it its name. In a broad sense, imprinting refers to an early experience that has a pro found influence on the later adult social and sexual behavior of an animal with respect to the choice of objects for these behaviors.
It is well known that in discrimination learning, experience is more effective for retention of learning. In imprinting, however, primacy of experience is the maximally effective factor. This difference is demonstrated by the following experiment. Two groups of eleven ducklings each were imprinted to two different imprinting objects. Animals of Group I were first individually imprinted to a male mallard model, and then to a female model. Group II, on the other hand, was first imprinted to a female model, and subsequently to a male model. Fourteen of the twenty-two ducklings, when tested with both models present, preferred the model to which they first had been imprinted, showing primacy. Only five preferred the model to which they had been imprinted.
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