I've recently became aware of the phenomenon of imprinting, in which baby animals start to associate with the first moving object with eyes that they see during a critical period of their infancy.
What interested me is that at the end of the imprinting article there is a snippet on the "baby duck syndrome" for humans:
In human–computer interaction, baby duck syndrome denotes the tendency for computer users to "imprint" on the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity to that first system.[9] The result is that "users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems."[10] The issue may present itself relatively early in a computer user's experience, and has been observed to impede education of students in new software systems.[11]
I'm interested if imprinting affects our ability to interact with computers, and if there is a "critical period" for learning computers.
For example, I repeatedly observed people in their 50s and above, who have not had any exposure to computers until their late 40s, fail to figure out how to operate a computer. A typical example is a bewildered user who has 2 monitors connected and is unable to comprehend or recall that a file can open on a monitor that is turned off, but is connected by cable. A "digital native" would be able to identify such issue in seconds. Is imprinting causing the difference between the experience of these two groups?