Imprinting has been extensively studied in precocial birds such as geese, ducks and chickens 1, 2, 3, 4. The infant may awaken sometime after the post‐birth sleep and find its decoy mother, commonly the self‐thumb unless a dummy has already been introduced, while the real mother sleeps. Similar social reactions are readily released in the human infant by other than the genetically based biological object as we see with a decoy bottle teat/pacifier/dummy/thumb replacing the absent or deprived maternal nipple when the newborn has not been given the opportunity to orally imprint with the mother's breast during the stage of alertness following birth and preceding sleep. The recognition would occur at a sensitive time, usually near the day of hatching, and a following response would become established even when the sighting was an inanimate decoy. He found that the first three‐dimensional representation of a moving sighting had by the newly hatched gosling, would be visually recognised as the mother. Lorenz was surprised that most precocious birds did not recognise their species through instinct. Imprinting is the term which was chosen by Konrad Lorenz in 1935 to describe the rapid visual acquisition of the ability of newly hatched goslings to recognise and socially bond to the mother for evolutionary survival 1.
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