Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
The other things that have to be equal in the case of the law of effect
are: First, the frequency, energy and duration of the connection,—that
is, the action of the law of exercise; second, the closeness with which
the satisfaction is associated with the response; and, third, the
readiness of the response to be connected with the situation.
The first of these accessory conditions requires no comment. A slightly
satisfying or indifferent response made often may win a closer connection
than a more satisfying response made only rarely.
The second is most clearly seen in the effect of increasing the interval
between the response and the satisfaction or discomfort. Such an increase
diminishes the rate of learning. If, for example, four boxes were
arranged so that turning a button caused a door to open (and permit a cat
to get freedom and food) in one, five, fifty and five hundred seconds,
respectively, a cat would form the habit of prompt escape from the first
box most rapidly and would almost certainly never form that habit in the
case of the fourth. The electric shock administered just as an animal
starts on the wrong path or touches the wrong mechanism, is potent, but
the same punishment administered ten or twenty seconds after an act will
have little or no effect upon that act.
Close temporal sequence is not the only means of insuring the connection
of the satisfaction with the response producing it. What is called
attention to the response counts also. If a cat pushes a button around
with its nose, while its main occupation, the act to which its general
‘set’ impels it, to which, we say, it is chiefly attentive, is that of
clawing at an opening, it will be less aided in the formation of the
habit than if it had been chiefly concerned in what its nose was doing.
The successful response is as a rule only a part of all that the animal
is doing at the time. In proportion as it is an eminent, emphatic part of
it, learning is aided. Similarly discomfort eliminates most the eminent,
emphatic features of the total response which it accompanies or shortly
follows.
The third factor, the susceptibility of the response and situation to
connection, is harder to illustrate. But, apparently, of those responses
which are equally strongly connected with a situation by nature and
equally attended to, some are more susceptible than others to a more
intimate connection.
The things which have to be equal in the case of the law of exercise
are the force of satisfyingness; that is, the action of the law of
effect, and again the readiness of the response to be connected with the
situation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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