Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
Having developed in No. 1 the habit of coming down to the bottom of his
cage to get a bit of food when he saw me reach out and take such a bit
from my desk, I tested his ability to discriminate by beginning to use
now one hand, now the other, feeding him only when I used the left.
I also used different sets of words, namely, ‘I will give some food’
and ‘They shall not have any.’ It will be seen later that he probably
reacted only to the difference of the hands. The experiment is similar
to that described on pages 129 and 130 of Chapter II. At the beginning,
it should be remembered, No. 1 would come down whichever hand was used,
no matter what was said, except in the occasional cases where he was so
occupied with some other pursuit as to be evidently inattentive. He did
come to associate the act of going down with the one signal and the act
of staying still or continuing his ordinary movements with the other
signal. His progress in learning to do so is best seen in the curves of
his errors. To the ‘yes’ signal he responded correctly, except for the
occasional lapses which I just mentioned, from the start and throughout.
With the ‘no’ signal his errors were as shown in Fig. 30, _a_. The break
in the curve at 110 and 120 is probably not significant of an actual
retrograde as the trials concerned followed an eight days’ cessation of
the experiments.
I next tried No. 1 with an apparatus exposing sometimes a card with a
diamond-shaped piece of buff-colored paper on it and sometimes a card
with a similar black piece. The black piece was three fourths of an
inch farther behind the opening than the other. The light color was the
‘yes’ signal. The error curves for both signals are given, as No. 1 at
the beginning of the experiment did not go down always (Fig. 30, _b_ and
_b₁_).
I next tried No. 1 with the same apparatus but exposing cards with YES
and N in place of the buff and black diamonds. The record of the errors
is given in Fig. 30, _c_ and _c₁_. At the start he came down halfway very
often. This I arbitrarily scored as an error no matter which signal it
was in response to. It should not be supposed that these curves represent
two totally new associations. It seems likely that the monkey reacted to
the _position_ of the N card in the apparatus (the same as that of the
black diamond card) rather than to the shape of the letters. On putting
the black diamond in front he was much confused.
I next gave No. 1 the chance to form the habits of coming down when I
rapped my pencil against the table twice and of staying where he was when
I rapped with it once. He had 90 trials of each signal but failed to give
evidence of any different associations in the two cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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