I need to find useful information about behavioral imprinting in non-human primates because the literature that I have reviewed does not show a conclusion about the existence of imprinting in these species.
A gap indeed. One of the famous authors on behavior in primates, Frans de Waal, does not mention imprinting in primates in his books. Maybe it is significant that Frans does mention 'imprinting' in one of his books, but in relation to good old Lorenz and dogs.
Thanks for your reply, Hein. I work on rehabilitation of wild primates and it is very important for our work to study the behavior of different species of monkeys. There is a lot of research on general behavior, but imprinting remains as a dark hole.
Would natural selection act strongly on a vertebrate that suckled and constantly carried its young? Especially with an offspring that was altricial, e.g. incapable of independent locomotion for long period?
In primates generally, you are moving away from the type of imprinting that we see in classic studies, such as those by Lorenz and those that followed. Everyone I've ever met who seeks to talk about an imprinting-like mechanisms in primates (including humans) has moved away from the language (and some processes) or imprinting, and toward attachment. For me, it is easy to move to attachment as an extension or evolutionary shift from (out of?) imprinting. For primate rehab, attachment theory provides, I think, the best opportunity for exploring important relationships between immature primates and caregivers and makes an excellent approach for understanding and managing nonhuman primate-human relationships (or parent/caregiver surrogate relationships if you have them) in primate rehab programs. It depends on what you hope information on imprinting will provide, but I expect you will have better luck with infant-caregiver (parent) attachment.
Joshua: thanks for your comments, they are very illustrative and useful for our intention. We are interested in the link mother-infant and the impact of this link in the self-species recognition, in order to try to revert that human influence in primates reared by people. Our experience shows that New World monkeys socialize very well with conspecifics even if they were reared by a human being, but it is not clear if the age is a decisive factor and if there is a critical period for the filial identification.
William: Interesting question. Natural selection allowed human beings to succeed but it could not be the same for other primates.
As someone who has been working on the topic of sexual imprinting I don't know of any systematic study (e.g. a controlled cross-fostering study) that has been done in primates, looking at mate choice effects. However, sexual imprinting does occur in mammals e.g. between goats and sheep (K.M. Kendrick, et al.Mothers determine sexual preferences Nature, 395 (1998), pp. 229–230) and the impact of the early rearing environment on later mate preferences is increasingly observed in other taxa than birds (fish like cichlids, even some insects and spiders).It is certainly likely that primate species are also affected in their later (sexual/social) behaviour by the species they are reared with (and human reared primates demonstrate this). It need not mean that their later sexual behaviour/sexual preferences will be fully determined by the rearing species, as mate choice is a complex process and many proximate cues may be important, some of which may and others may not be affected by early experience. Also, as you say, age of such exposure may be important. In some bird species the sentive phase for sexual impriting is later than that for filial imprinting, making that even when initially reared by and attached to another species, transfer to the own species later on may still result in mate preferences for conspecifics. In any case: my guess would be that a careful study will show effects of such a deviating early experience in many species and I would keep this in mind when e.g. conservation reasons make it necessary to cross foster young primates.
Thanks for your complete answer, Carel. It is a very interesting topic for research and it would be very important for the programs that handle primates in captivity.
Hello, Vicky. Many researches say that primates do not have imprinting because learning process is too complex and there are many other forms of learning. Imprinting seems to be very important in precocial birds, but even in altricial birds there is not a definitive consensus about it.
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