Comparative Psychology

             Since Lorenz' discovery of obedient imprinting in 1935, the interpretation of this behavioral phenomenon has changed several times. Lorenz himself always emphasized the distinctive nature of imprinting processes (the main variants: filial, sexual, food, and habitat) when compared with other kinds of learning. However, today, we speak of sensitive, rather critical periods, and we now know that secondary imprinted attachments can be as stable as primary ones, thereby limiting the impact of assumed reversibility. Nevertheless, in his study of imprinting, Lorenz did more than describe a new and special category of behavior he was the first to understand how specific genetic constraints can define the structure of a learning mechanism. Consistent with there being specialized learning mechanisms, twenty years later, using rats, John Garcia (1955) demonstrated !
             for the first time that not every case of associative learning can be explained by simply referring to a small set of general (or even universal) learning rules. Meanwhile, it has been argued that it is possible to conclusively resolve the misleading innate/acquired dichotomy by treating phylogeny as the exclusive source of ontogenetic novelties (Heschl, 1990). This explains how once the ultimate functions of a behavior pattern in a particular species is understood it is possible to predict the necessary proximate structure of that behavior.
             The experiments that Konrad Lorenz performed on animals were to demonstrate that critical periods in development do exist. The early trendsetting study done by Lorenz (1957), was to help describe imprinting in goslings. He showed that the newborn goslings would adopt, in the first few hours ...

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Comparative Psychology . (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 01:21, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/59501.html