Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
If one puts a chick on top of a box in sight of his fellows below, the
chick will regulate his conduct by the height of the box. To be definite,
we may take the average chick of about 95 hours. If the height is less
than 10 inches, he will jump down as soon as you put him up. At 16 inches
he will jump in from 5 seconds to 3 or 4 minutes. At 22 inches he will
still jump down, but after more hesitation. At 27½ inches 6 chicks out
of eight at this age jumped within 5 minutes. At 39 inches the chick
_will NOT jump down_. The numerical values given here would, of course,
vary with the health, development, hunger and degree of lonesomeness of
the chick. All that they are supposed to show is that at any given age
the chick without experience of heights regulates his conduct rather
accurately in accord with the space-fact of distance which confronts
him. The chick does not peck at objects remote from him, does not, for
instance, confuse a bird a score of feet away with a fly near by, or try
to get the moon inside his bill. Moreover, he reacts in pecking with
considerable accuracy at the very start. Lloyd Morgan has noted that in
his very first efforts the chick often fails to seize the object, though
he hits it, and on this ground has denied the perfection of the instinct.
But, as a matter of fact, the pecking reaction may be as perfect at birth
as it is after 10 or 12 days’ experience. It certainly is not perfect
then. I took nine chicks from 10 to 14 days old and placed them one at
a time on a clear surface over which were scattered grains of cracked
wheat (the food they had been eating in this same way for a week) and
watched the accuracy of their pecking. Out of 214 objects pecked at, 159
were seized, 55 _were not_. Out of the 159 that were seized, _only_ 116
were seized on the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the third, and the
remaining two on the fourth. Of the 55 that were not successfully seized,
31 were pecked at only once, 10 twice, 10 three times, 3 four times and
1 five times. I fancy one would find that adult fowls would show by no
means a perfect record. So long as chicks with ten days’ experience fail
to seize on the first trial 45 per cent of the time, it is hardly fair to
argue against the perfection of the instinct on the ground of failures to
seize during the first day.
The chick’s practical appreciation of space-facts is seen further in his
attempts to escape when confined. Put chicks only twenty or thirty hours
old in a box with walls three or four inches high and they will react to
the perpendicularity of the confining walls by trying to jump over them.
In fact, in the ways he moves, the directions he takes and the objects he
reacts to, the chicken has prior to experience the power of appropriate
reaction to colors and facts of all three dimensions.
INSTINCTIVE MUSCULAR COÖRDINATIONS
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