Imprinting (psychology)

It was first used to describe situations in which an animal or person learns the characteristics of some stimulus, which is therefore said to be "imprinted" onto the subject.

[1] It was first reported in domestic chickens, by Sir Thomas More in 1516 as described in his treatise Utopia, 350 years earlier than by the 19th-century amateur biologist Douglas Spalding.

It was rediscovered by the early ethologist Oskar Heinroth, and studied extensively and popularized by his disciple Konrad Lorenz working with greylag geese.

[2] Lorenz demonstrated how incubator-hatched geese would imprint on the first suitable moving stimulus they saw within what he called a "critical period" between 13 and 16 hours shortly after hatching.

[3] In a similar project, orphaned Canada geese were trained to their normal migration route by the Canadian ultralight enthusiast Bill Lishman, as shown in the fact-based movie drama Fly Away Home.

The breeder then courts a suitable imprint female bird (including offering food, if it is part of that species's normal courtship).

[13] The term is also described as the human emotional map, deep-seated beliefs, and values that are stored in the brain's limbic system and govern people's lives at the subconscious level.

[14] It is one of the suggested explanations for the claim that the experiences of an infant, particularly during the first two years of life, contribute to a person's lifelong psychological development.

Evolutionary trends within the animal kingdom have been shown to show substantive increase in the forebrain particularly towards the limbic system.

The Westermarck effect has since been observed in many places and cultures, including in the Israeli kibbutz system, and the Chinese shim-pua marriage customs, as well as in biological-related families.

In the case of the Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms), children were reared somewhat communally in peer groups, based on age, not biological relation.

[17] However, Eran Shor and Dalit Simchai claimed that the case of the kibbutzim actually provides little support for the Westermarck effect.

Sigmund Freud argued that as children, members of the same family naturally lust for one another, making it necessary for societies to create incest taboos,[20] but Westermarck argued the reverse, that the taboos themselves arise naturally as products of innate attitudes.