Thank you @mrnobyl For the references. Looking into them, KA’s link has the below excerpt. It doesn’t indicate that imprinting is informed by experience however. It only makes the point that imprinting can be applied to what isn’t intended, but that falls in line with how imprinting is innate in that it isn’t in control of the animal itself. As the note says, an innate behavior is when an animal can perform the behavior the first time it is exposed to the proper stimulus.
How do we know this is not an innate behavior, in which the duckling is hardwired to follow around a female duck? That is, how do we know imprinting is a learning process conditioned by experience? If newborn ducks or geese see a human before they see their mother, they will imprint on the human and follow it around just as they would follow their real mother.
Anytime Michael, and I understand what you are saying but a key aspect of innate behaviors is that if we give the stimulus the behavior should be triggered for the untrained animal no matter the condition. Imprinting features a critical period that explains the seemingly genetic aspect of it but that does make it a phase-sensitive associative learning. For example, if we take an animal that has been isolated during its critical period of imprinting and then present it with something to try and imprint with after this stage it won’t be able to, therefore it isn’t intrinsic or consummate which are features of innate behaviors.
Here is also an excerpt from the Development of the Nervous System Ch 10: Behavioral Development
“Many vertebrates are born with an ability to obtain food and warmth from their mother, when offered. Nestling herring gulls peck at the tip of their mother’s beak for food, neonatal rodents assume a specific position in order to suckle at a nipple, and newly hatched jewel fish have a natural tendency to approach objects that are colored like the broody adult. Although these innate motor behaviors are very sophisticated in the apparent absence of any experience, many animals must learn to recognize and respond selectively to their mother. Konrad Lorenz, a corecipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize, made the rather dramatic observation that hatchling ducks and geese will follow the first moving object that they see, forming a very stable attachment (Lorenz, 1937). Ordinarily, the mother goose fills this role, but hatchlings can also learn to follow inanimate objects, and even the experimenter himself (Figure 10.31A). This learned behavior is termed filial imprinting (there is no biological relationship to genomic imprinting, discussed above). Filial imprinting has the immediate advantage of keeping offspring with the provider, and it can also have implications much later in life”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780123745392000148?via%3Dihub
Thanks for pointing this out @mrnobyl . You’re right, I hadn’t thought of stage of life as being “specific context” for when the behavior can occur. Found another source about it as well: Learned Behaviour | BioNinja