Development, maintenance, and extinction of social attachment behavior in sheep.

Abstract

Social attachment behavior oi 20 purebred lambs was studied over a 6-mo. period. In the first of 3 experiments, the reinforcing properties of strong attachments formed by young lambs to the perceptually prominent objects, animate or inanimate, with which they had been continously confined were demonstrated in a series of maze tests. The remaining 2 experiments dealt with the processes involved in the extinction of previously acquired social attachments by analyzing some of the effects of short-term social and biological deprivation, and examining the conditions under which the attachments might be reversed.