Supernormal Stimulus

Niko Tinbergen documented in the 1940s that animals could be made to prefer artificial stimuli over the natural ones they evolved to respond to. An oystercatcher presented with a giant plaster egg would abandon its own eggs to try to incubate the supernormal substitute; a stickleback would attack a wooden fish with exaggerated red markings in preference to an actual rival. The mechanism: evolved response systems track specific features, and stimuli exaggerating those features hijack the system, triggering responses disproportionate to what the natural world could produce. The concept became central to media-effects research because every successive medium — television, video games, social media, now AI — operates at least partly through supernormal exaggeration of features developing brains evolved to respond to. Television was supernormal relative to the caregiver's face. AI is supernormal relative to television.