What are the TACTICS of Imprinting?
Many lab researchers know that newly hatched goslings and ducklings will follow and become socially bonded to the first moving object they encounter when other environmental distractions are controlled and minimized. Konrad Lorenz, in his classic studies of this learning style, thought that the bond formed immediately, that it was irreversible and that it only developed during a brief “critical period” in the first day or so after hatching. Lorenz employed the term “Imprinting” to describe the process by which this social bond of interaction was formed. He implied that during a gosling or duckling’s first encounter with a moving object the image of the object is somehow stamped irreversibly on the nervous system. For decades, no one questioned these assumptions. The Occam’s Razor principle, often quoted to justify authoritarian simplicity against the reality of multiple factors and variabilities, is more often wrong than correct. It states the “whenever a solution to a problem remains
