3. The Contribution of Ethology. The term, if not
the idea, of imprinting derives from Oskar Heinroth
and from Konrad Lorenz. Heinroth, a German zoolo-
gist and ethologist, read a paper in 1910 in which he
described the behavior of incubator-hatched graylag
goslings (“Beiträge zur Biologie, nahmentlich Ethologie
und Psychologie der Anatiden,” Verh. 5 int. orn. Kongr.
Berlin [1910], 589-702). These newly hatched birds
showed no fear, and attached themselves readily to
human beings. Such man-attached goslings do not show
any inclination to approach and stay with parent-geese;
they behave as if they treated people as their parents.
This kind of attachment-behavior was described by
Heinroth by the verb einzuprägen, corresponding to
the English “to stamp in” or “to imprint”; and the
word “stamped in” had earlier been used, among
others, by Spalding, and above all, by Thorndike (“An-
imal Intelligence,” Psychol. Monogr., 1898) in relation
to firmly acquired modes of behavior.
The pioneer ethologist, Lorenz, used the noun
Prägung, or imprinting, in his seminal paper in 1935,
to refer to the process of rapid bound-formation early
in the life of the so-called nidifugous birds (the fowl,
ducks, geese, and the like). Lorenz went further than
Spalding or James in that he specified the charac-
teristics of imprinting, and thereby generated much
interest in it, which, in turn, has resulted in further
systematic observations and much controlled experi-
mentation in this area of animal behavior. It could be
said that Lorenz rather “stuck out his neck” in saying
initially that imprinting differed fundamentally from,
what he called, ordinary learning. First—he held—it
could take place only during a brief critical period in
the individual's life; and second, once it had taken
place, it could not be reversed. Furthermore, imprint-
ing was reported to occur very rapidly, without any
trial and error; and, above all, imprinting would show
itself, at maturity, in a courtship directed towards the
original mother-figure or figures similar to her.
It was later questioned whether these features, even
if true, would separate imprinting sharply from other
forms of learning. Indeed, Lorenz himself, some twenty
years after the appearance of his early papers, expressed
the view that imprinting might be a type of condition-
ing. Whether it is, or is not, would depend partly on
how narrowly or broadly conditioning is defined. But
even if imprinting were to be shown to be continuous
with, or to be a form of, conditioning, there is no doubt
that it is a phenomenon deserving special attention,
not only because it is of great interest to ontogenetic
studies of animal behavior but also because of its im-
plications for human developmental psychology and
psychopathology.
