Konrad Lorenz was one of the three scientists who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns.
Lorenz helped establish ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior in natural settings. He investigated innate behavior, including fixed action patterns, and showed how particular signals could trigger predictable responses in animals.
The 1973 prize was shared with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. Lorenz is also strongly associated with imprinting, especially through observations of young birds following the first moving object they encountered. Imprinting is related to early learning, whereas a fixed action pattern refers to an inherited behavioral sequence.
Modern behavioral biology combines the approaches of ethology, ecology, neuroscience, and genetics. Lorenz’s work helped shift animal behavior research toward experimentally testable explanations of both instinct and learning.