Definition
Shortly after birth or hatching, the young of some animals, usually of precocial species, learn to recognize their mother and/or other social partners (e.g., siblings) by simply being exposed to them, and subsequently exhibit affiliative responses to them. Filial imprinting is thus a form of perceptual learning that serves to confine social preferences and social attachment to a specific object (or class of objects) as a result of exposure to that object (Bateson 1990).
Introduction
Filial imprinting was known from antiquity and exploited by farmers and breeders. It was originally described in the scientific literature by Douglas Spalding and later studied and popularized by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1935).
Although imprinting phenomena have been described in mammals, they have been mostly studied in birds. Filial imprinting is most readily apparent in precocialspecies, i.e., those whose young are relatively mature and mobile soon after birth or hatching. Domestic...
Keywords
- Filial Imprinting
- Imprinting Object
- Sexual Imprinting
- Biological Motion Stimuli
- Animal Cognition Studies
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Bateson, P. P. G. (1966). The characteristics and context of imprinting. Biological Reviews, 41, 177–217.
Bateson, P. (1990). Is imprinting such a special case? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 329, 125–131.
Bolhuis, J. J. (1991). Mechanisms of avian imprinting: A review. Biological Reviews, 66, 303–345.
Di Giorgio, E., Loveland, J. L., Mayer, U., Rosa-Salva, O., Versace, E., & Vallortigara, G. (2016). Filial responses as predisposed and learned preferences: Early attachment in chicks and babies. Behavioural Brain Research, 325, 90–104.
Horn, G. (2004). Pathways of the past: The imprint of memory. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 108–120.
Lorenz, K. (1935). Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels. Journal für Ornithologie, 83(137–213), 289–413.
Martinho, A., & Kacelnik, A. (2016). Ducklings imprint on the relational concept of “same or different”. Science, 80, 286–288.
Rogers, L. J., Vallortigara, G., & Andrew, R. J. (2013). Divided brains. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Santolin, C., Rosa-Salva, O., Vallortigara, G., & Regolin, L. (2016). Unsupervised statistical learning in newly-hatched chicks. Current Biology, 26, 1218–1220.
Vallortigara, G. (2012). Core knowledge of object, number, and geometry: A comparative and neural approach. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29(1–2), 213–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2012.654772
Versace, E., Spierings, M. J., Caffini, M., ten Cate, C., & Vallortigara, G. (2017). Spontaneous generalization of abstract multimodal patterns in young domestic chicks. Animal Cognition, 20, 521–529. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1079-5.
Yamaguchi, S., Aoki, N., Kitajima, T., Iikubo, E., Katagiri, S., Matsushima, T., & Homma, K. J. (2012). Thyroid hormone determines the start of the sensitive period of imprinting and primes later learning. Nature Communications, 3, 1081. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2088.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Vallortigara, G., Versace, E. (2018). Filial Imprinting. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1989-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1989-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences