Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
Even the casual observer, if he has any psychological insight, will be
struck by the general, aimless, intrinsically valuable (to the animal’s
feelings) physical activities of a monkey compared with the specialized,
definitely aroused, utilitarian activities of a dog or cat. Watch the
latter and he does but few things, does them in response to obvious
sense presentations, does them with practical consequences of food,
sex-indulgence, preparation for adult battles, etc. If nothing that
appeals to his special organization comes up, he does nothing. Watch a
monkey and you cannot enumerate the things he does, cannot discover the
stimuli to which he reacts, cannot conceive the _raison d’être_ of his
pursuits. Everything appeals to him. He likes to be active for the sake
of activity.
The observer who has proper opportunities and takes proper pains will
find this intrinsic interest to hold of mental activity as well. No. 1
happened to hit a projecting wire so as to make it vibrate. He repeated
this act hundreds of times in the few days following. He did not, could
not, eat, make love to, or get preliminary practice for the serious
battles of life out of, that sound. But it did give him mental food,
mental exercise. Monkeys seem to enjoy strange places; they revel, if I
may be permitted an anthropomorphism, in novel objects. They like to have
feelings as they do to make movements. The fact of mental life is to them
its own reward.
It is beyond question rash for any one to venture hypotheses concerning
the brain parallel of mental conditions, most of all for the ignoramus
in the comparative histology of the nervous system, but one cannot help
thinking that the behavior of the monkeys points to a cerebrum that is
no longer a conservative machine for making a few well-defined sorts of
connections between sense-impressions and acts, that is not only fitted
to do more delicate work in parts, but is also alive, tender all over,
functioning throughout, set off in action by anything and everything. And
if one adds coördinations allowing a freedom and a differentiation of
action of the muscles used in speech comparable to that already present
in connection with the monkey’s hand, he may well ask, “What more of a
nervous mechanism do you need to parallel the behavior of the year-old
child?” However, this is not the place to speculate upon the importance
to human development of our instinctive aimless activity, physical and
mental, or to describe further its similarity and evident phylogenetic
relationship to the instinctive behavior of the monkeys. Elsewhere I
shall undertake that task.
4. In their method of learning, the monkeys do not advance far beyond the
generalized mammalian type, but in their proficiency in that method they
do. They seem at least to form associations very much faster, and they
form very many more. They also seem superior in the delicacy and in the
complexity of the associations formed and the connections seem to be more
permanent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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