To what objects will the chick get attached? That moving object will usually be a parent—but if the parents have been removed, then the object could be a cardboard box, or a red balloon—or even Konrad Lorenz himself. During the next two days, as the gosling follows its parents, it somehow learns to recognize them as individuals and not follow any other geese. Now when it loses contact with the mother it will cease to feed or examine things, and instead will search and make piping sounds, as though distressed at being lost. Then the parent responds with a special sound—and Lorenz observes that this response must come quickly to establish imprinting. Later this call is no longer needed, but in the meantime it serves to protect the chick against becoming attached to an unsuitable object, such as the moving branch of a tree.
These ‘piping’ sounds, like the ‘hoo’ signals in Jane Goodall’s notes, suggest that other ways to communicate could have co-evolved from attachment signals. In any case, these types of birds can feed themselves soon after they hatch—so imprinting is independent of being fed.
As for when the imprinting period ends, R.A.Hinde discovered that those chicks eventually become fearful of unfamiliar moving things—which led him to suspect that imprinting stops when this new fear forestalls further ‘following’. Similarly, many human babies show a long period of fear of strangers that begins near the start of the second year.[21]
Bowlby’s research on young children showed that when they are deprived of imprimers for more than a few days, they may show signs of impairments for much longer times. He also cites similar results when other researchers separated infant Rhesus monkeys from their mothers:
Remarkably, even badly mistreated children (and monkeys) may remain attached to abusive imprimer.[23]
To what extent did human attachment-based learning evolve from older forms of pre-human imprinting? Of course, humans are very different from birds, yet the infants of both share similar needs—and there may have been precursors of this in some earlier warm-blooded dinosaurs. For example, Jack Horner[24] discovered that some of these constructed clusters of bird-nest like structures. Further progress in genomics might help us reconstruct more of this history.
Returning to the human realm, we should ask how infants distinguish potential imprimers. Although some researchers have reported that infants can learn to recognize the mother’s voice even before the time of birth, it is generally though that newborns first learn mainly through the senses of touch, taste, and smell—and later distinguish the sound of a voice and start to react to the sight of a head or a face. One first might assume that this is done by detecting features like eyes, nose, and mouth, but there is evidence that it is more complex than that.[25]
Francesca Acerra
This researcher found that those infants react less to the features of the face, and more to its larger-scale, overall shape; it was not until two or three more months that her subjects distinguished particular faces.[27] This suggests that our visual systems involve different methods at different stages of development—and perhaps the ones that are first to operate serve mainly to get the mother attached to the child! In any case, Lorenz was amazed by what his goslings
Konrad Lorenz:
I don’t find this so strange because all geese look almost the same to me. Perhaps more important is that adult sexual preference may be established at this early time, though it only much later appears in behavior.
Some studies have shown that after such contact, some of those birds will eventually mate with other members of their species. However, this phenomenon is still such a serious problem in repopulating endangered species that it has become the standard policy to minimize human contact with chicks, lest their preference for people lead them to later refuse to mate with their peers. Could such delays be relevant to human sexual preferences?
All of this could help to explain why we evolved our extended infantile helplessness: children who too soon went off by themselves would not have been wise enough to survive—and so, we had to extend the time for learning from imprimers instead of from doing risky experiments.
§2-8. Who are our Imprimers?
A JACKDAW, seeing Doves in a place with much food, painted himself white to join them. The Doves, as long as he did not speak, assumed that he was another Dove and admitted him to their cote. But when one day he forgot not to speak, they expelled him because his voice was wrong—and when he returned to his Jackdaw tribe they expelled him because his color was wrong. So desiring two ends, he obtained neither.
How many Imprimers can a person have? Many young children have only one, while others may have two, three, or more. Then when a child has several of them, are those attachments interchangeable—or could they serve different functions and goals? If a child forms several sets of ideals, would that enrich its personality—or would it impair its development because those inconsistencies prevent it from forming a single coherent self- image?[29]
When do attachments begin and end? Even young infants soon start to behave in distinctive ways when in their mothers’ presence. However, it is usually not till near the first year’s end that the child protests against separation—and begins to learn to become disturbed at a sign that Imprimer
