Parameters of Imprinting

Abstract

Imprinting involves the rapid establishment of perceptual preferences. It is clearly distinct from the "following-response," though most experimenters have tended to confuse the two. It is in motorically precocial forms requiring parental care that imprinting generally occurs, or in cases where the pattern upon which imprinting should occur is only briefly present. Neither the factors that initiate nor those that terminate the critical period for imprinting, nor those that determine the stability of the imprinted bond are known. The social and ecologic consequences of imprinting may include fetishism, the maintenance of barriers to hybridization, and of species-character-istic habitat preferences. Imprinting also permits these latter to change with extreme rapidity.