Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
[1] ‘Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative
Processes in Animals’ (’98), ‘The Instinctive Reactions of Young Chicks’
(’99), ‘A Note on the Psychology of Fishes’ (’99), and ‘The Mental Life
of the Monkeys’ (’01). I have added a theoretical paper, ‘The Evolution
of the Human Intellect,’ which appeared in the _Popular Science Monthly_
in 1901, and which was a direct outgrowth of the experimental work. I am
indebted to the management of the _Psychological Review_, and that of the
_American Naturalist_ and _Popular Science Monthly_, for permission to
reprint the three shorter papers.
[2] Unless one assumes telepathic influences.
[3] Reason in Common Sense, p. 154 ff.
[4] This chapter originally appeared as Monograph Supplement No. 8 of the
Psychological Review.
[5] I do not mean that scientists have been too credulous with regard
to spiritualism, but am referring to the cases where ten or twenty
scientists have been sent to observe some trick-performance by a
spiritualistic ‘medium,’ and have all been absolutely confident that they
understood the secret of its performance, _each of them giving a totally
different explanation_.
[6] The phrase ‘practically utter hunger’ has given rise to
misunderstandings. I have been accused of experimenting with starving or
half-starved animals, with animals brought to a state of fear and panic
by hunger, and the like!
The desideratum is, of course, to have the motive as nearly as possible
of equal strength in each experiment with any one animal with any one
act. That is, the animal should be as hungry at the tenth or twentieth
trial as at the first. To attain this, the animal was given after each
‘success’ only a very small bit of food as a reward (say, for a young
cat, one quarter of a cubic centimeter of fish or meat) and tested not
too many times on any one day. ‘Utter hunger’ means that no diminution in
his appetite was noted and that at the close of the experiment for the
day he would still eat a hearty meal. After the experiments for the day
were done, the cats received abundant food to maintain health, growth and
spirits, but commonly somewhat less than they would of their own accord
have taken. No one of the many visitors to the room mentioned anything
extraordinary or distressful in the animals’ condition. There were no
signs of fear or panic.
Possibly I was wrong in choosing the term ‘utter hunger’ to denote the
hunger of an animal in good, but not pampered, condition and without food
for fourteen hours. It is not sure, however, that the term ‘utter hunger’
is inappropriate. The few reports made of experiments in going without
food seem to show that, in health, the feeling of hunger reaches its
maximum intensity very early. It is of course not at all the same thing
as the complex of discomforts produced by long-continued insufficiency of
food. Hunger is not at all a synonym for starvation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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