Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
If the animal profits by his training by acquiring ideas of the two
signals and associates with them ideas of ‘food’ and ‘no food,’ ‘go
down’ and ‘stay still,’ and uses these ideas to control his conduct, he
will, we have a right to expect, change suddenly from total failure to
differentiate the signals to total success. He will or won’t have the
ideas, and will behave accordingly. The same result could, of course, be
brought about by very rapid association of the new signal with the act
of keeping still, a very rapid inhibition of the act of going down in
response to it by virtue of the lack of any pleasure from doing so.
For convenience I shall call the signals after which food was given _yes_
signals and those after which food was not given _no_ signals. Signals
not described in the text are shown in Fig. 29, below. The progress of
the monkeys in discriminating is shown by Figs. 30 and 31, on pages 199
and 201. In Figs. 30 and 31 every millimeter along the horizontal or
base line represents 10 trials with the signal. The heights of the black
surface represent the percentages of _wrong_ responses, 10 mm. meaning
100 per cent of incorrect responses. Thus the first figure of the set,
Left hand, _a_, presents the following record: First 10 trials, all
wrong; of next 10, 7 wrong; of next 10, 6 wrong; of next 10, 7; of the
next, 9; of the next, 9; of the next, 4; of the next, none; of the next,
3; of the next, 2, and then 70 trials without an error.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
I will describe some of the experiments in detail and then discuss the
graphic presentation of them all.
EXPERIMENTS WITH NO. 1
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