Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
Here we have the simplest and at the same time the most widespread sort
of intellect or learning in the world. There is no reasoning, no process
of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting
two and two together; there are no ideas—the animal does not think of
the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. He simply comes
after the learning to feel like doing a certain thing under certain
circumstances which before the learning he did not feel like doing. Human
beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and
controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to
have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and
isolated events in nature. There may be a few scattered ideas possessed
by the higher animals, but the common form of intelligence with them,
their habitual method of learning, is not by the acquisition of ideas,
but by the selection of impulses.
Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. When we learn to drive
a golf ball or play tennis or billiards, when we learn to tell the price
of tea by tasting it or to strike a certain note exactly with the voice,
we do not learn in the main by virtue of any ideas that are explained
to us, by any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the gradual
selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its association with the
circumstances or situation requiring it, in just the way that the animals
do.
From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man
this type of intellect is found. With it there are in the mammals obscure
traces of the ideas which come in the mental life of man to outweigh
and hide it. But it is the basal fact. As we follow the development of
animals in time, we find the capacity to select impulses growing. We find
the associations thus made between situation and act growing in number,
being formed more quickly, lasting longer and becoming more complex
and more delicate. The fish can learn to go to certain places, to take
certain paths, to bite at certain things and refuse others, but not much
more. It is an arduous proceeding for him to learn to get out of a small
pen by swimming up through a hole in a screen. The monkey can learn to do
all sorts of things. It is a comparatively short and easy task for him
to learn to get into a box by unhooking a hook, pushing a bar around and
pulling out a plug. He learns quickly to climb down to a certain place
when he sees a letter T on a card and to stay still when he sees a K. He
performs the proper acts nearly as well after 50 days as he did when they
were fresh in his mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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