A male bittern bird was raised in a cage from birth by a zookeeper.

Question

A male bittern bird was raised in a cage from birth by a zookeeper. At puberty, a female bittern was added to the cage. The male bittern refused the female and instead directed mating behaviors to the zookeeper. This inappropriate behavior is an example of an error in

A	classical conditioning
B	imprinting

C: I think is this one because a bird isn't mature when it refuses its natural instinct

C	maturation
D	operant conditioning

Answer 1

Unfortunately none of the answers actually make sense as the question was asked. Maturation in the physical sense doesn't seem to be the issue here as the captive male seems to have grown normally and maintained its instinctual behaviors. The problem is how the behavior is directed.

I recommend reviewing the differences between classical and operant conditioning, but neither of these seems to be operating here - conditioning (either type) elicits a certain response from a subject after it's been trained to make associations with different kinds of stimuli. There's nothing in the description of the question that suggests any type of conditioning has been taking place.

Imprinting is when a young animal accepts whatever it first encounters as its parent. So if you're there when a bird hatches it will act like you're its parent. It may follow you around or beg you for food. What we're seeing here is closest to imprinting.

But is the described behavior an error in imprinting? What does that mean? Imprinting essentially is an error so there's not a right or wrong way to do it. Is the question suggesting the bittern shouldn't direct mating effort towards its parent (which it thinks the zookeeper is)? That seems a bit abstract.

As I said in the beginning, it doesn't really make sense, but my opinion is that the answer they're looking for is B.