ABSTRACT
Imprinting in the classical sense takes place primarily in nidifugous birds. It is now also established that sexual imprinting occurs in many species of altricial birds. Imprinting-like attachments are known to develop in various precocial mammals. Once the idea was mooted that something like imprinting occurs also in altricial mammals, there was no reason to think that human beings would be immune to this process. Since young children do become attached to adults, the question arises as to whether there are elements in this process which are other than the familiar types of conditioning, and if so, whether it is reasonable to describe such learning as imprinting. We shall consider the theoretical problem of explaining the ontogeny of human attachments in a later section of this chapter. In this section, we shall trace the history of the view that imprinting is a feature of human development, and consider any factual knowledge which may bear on this contention.
