Superstimulus

Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen developed the concept in the early 1950s through experiments on birds and insects. In his 1951 book The Study of Instinct, he showed that animals would respond more intensely to artificial exaggerations of natural stimuli than to the real thing — preferring oversized plaster eggs to their own eggs, and directing courtship behavior toward models with more vivid markings than any real animal possessed. Tinbergen, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in ethology, coined the term to describe how innate releasing mechanisms could be hijacked by any sufficiently exaggerated signal.