Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
I next used for the ‘yes’ signal the familiar act and for the ‘no’
signal the act of holding the food six inches above the box instead of
a quarter or a half an inch. The progress is shown in Fig. 31, _E_ and
_E₁_. I then tried taking the food from a saucer off the front of the
box for the ‘yes’ signal and from a small box at the back for the ‘no’
signal. ‘Yes’ was perfect from the start (10 trials given). ‘No’ was
right once, then wrong once, then right for the remaining eight.
EXPERIMENTS WITH NO. 3
No. 3 was kept in a cage not half so big as those of 1 and 2. Perhaps
because of the hindrance this fact offered to forming the habit of
reacting in some definite way to ‘yes’ signals, perhaps because of
the fact that I did not try hand movements as signals, there was no
successful discrimination by No. 3 of the yellow from the black diamond
or of a card with YES from a card with a circle on it. I tried climbing
up to a particular spot as the response to the ‘yes’ signal and staying
still as the response to the ‘no’ signal. I also tried instead of the
latter a different act, in which case the animal was fed after both
signals but in different places. In the latter case No. 3 made some
progress, but for practical reasons I postponed experiments with him.
Circumstances have made it necessary to postpone such experiments
indefinitely.
PERMANENCE OF THE ABILITY TO DISCRIMINATE
No. 1 and No. 2 were tried again after intervals of 33 to 48 days. The
results of these trials are shown in Fig. 32. Here every millimeter
along the base line represents _one_ trial with the ‘no’ signal (the
‘yes’ signals were practically perfect), and failure is represented by a
column 10 mm. high while success is represented by the absence of any
column. Thus the first record reads, “No. 1 with signal 104 after 40
days made 5 failures, then 2 successes, then 1 failure, then 1 success,
then 3 failures, then 1 success, then 1 failure, then 3 successes, then
1 failure, then 10 successes.” The third record (106; 40 days) reads,
“perfect success in ten trials.”
[Illustration: FIG. 32.]
DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
The results of all these discrimination experiments emphasize the
rapidity of formation of associations amongst the monkeys, which appeared
in their behavior toward the mechanisms. The suddenness of the change in
many cases is immediately suggestive of human performances. If all the
records were like c, f, h, i, j, k, l, m, B, E, and memory trials 103,
A, B, and C, one would have to credit the animals with either marvelous
rapidity in forming associations of the purely animal sort or concede
that from all the objective evidence at hand they were shown to learn as
human beings would. One would have to suppose that they had clear ideas
of the signals and clean-cut associations with those ideas. The other
records check such a conclusion.
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