Campo obligatorio; no debe dejarse en blanco.

 

Supernormal stimulus

Organisms tend to show a preference for the stimulus properties (e.g. size, colour, etc.) that have evolved in nature, but when offered an artificial exaggerated stimulus, animals will show behaviour in favour of the artificial stimulus over the naturally occurring stimulus.^[3] A variety of organisms display or are susceptible to supernormal stimuli, including insects, birds, and humans.

Supernormal stimuli are present in areas of biology and psychology, but are also studied within other fields like sociology and art.

Niko Tinbergen, coined this term through his research, which discovered that experimenters could display an alternate target that attract an organism's attention more so than the naturally occurring target.^[4] Tinbergen studied herring gulls, and found the chicks peck at the red spot located on their parent's bill. The offspring targets the red spot due to the contrast of color (stimulus).^[4] They do this in order to receive food through regurgitation from the parent.^[4] Tinbergen and colleagues developed an experiment that presented different models to chicks and determined their pecking rates.^[4] They used different models including an adult herring gull's natural head, a standard wooden model of its head, the bill only, and a red stick with smaller white markings on it.^[4] The pecking rate of the chicks were consistent with the natural head, standard head model, and the bill only model.^[4] The pecking rate of the chicks increased when presented with the stick model.^[4] This suggests that the chicks preferred the dramatic contrast of the red stick with the yellow markings, therefore the artificial stimulus of the stick model was favored over the basic herring gull head and bill models, proving that the artificial stimuli was favored over the naturally occurring stimuli. Following his extensive analysis of the stimulus features that elicited food-begging in the chick of the herring gull, he constructed an artificial stimulus consisting of a red knitting needle with three white bands painted around it; this elicited a stronger response than an accurate three-dimensional model of the parent's head (white) and bill (yellow with a red spot).^[4]