Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
The experiments had in this respect both a negative or destructive and
a positive or constructive meaning. On the one hand, they showed that
animal learning was not homologous with human association of ideas; that
animal learning was not human learning _minus_ abstract and conceptual
thought, but was on a still ‘lower’ level. On the other hand, the first
positive evidence that animals could, under certain circumstances, learn,
as man so commonly does, by the indirect connection of a response with a
situation through some non-sensory relic or representative of the latter,
came from my experiments.
It was perhaps natural that the more exciting denial of habitual learning
by ideas should have attracted more attention than the somewhat tedious
experiments to prove that under certain conditions they could so learn.
At all events, a perverse tradition seems to have grown up to the effect
that I denied the possibility of animals having images or learning in any
case by representative thinking.
There is some excuse for this tradition in the fact that whereas the
proof that the habitual learning of these dogs and cats did not require
‘ideas’ is clear and emphatic, my evidence that certain features of their
behavior _did_ require ‘ideas’ is complicated and imperfect.
The fact seems to be that a ‘free idea’ comes in the animals or in
man only as a result of a somewhat elaborate process of analysis or
extraction from a gross total sensory process. The primary level or grade
of experience, common to animals and little babies, comprises states
of mind such as an adult man gets if lost in anger, fear, suffocation,
dyspepsia, looking at a panorama of unknown objects with head upside
down, smelling the mixture of odors of a soap factory, driving a golf
ball, dashing to the net in a game of tennis, warding off a blow, or
swimming under water. For a man to get a distinct controllable percept of
approaching asthma, of a carpet loom seen upside down, or of a successful
‘carry through,’ or ‘smash’ or ‘lob,’ so that one knows just what one is
experiencing or doing, and can recall just what one experienced or did,
requires further experience of the element in question—contemplation of
it in isolation or dealings with it in many varied connections. So for
a cat to get a distinct controllable percept of a loop, or of its own
clawing or nosing or pulling, it must have the capacity to analyze such
elements out of the total gross complexes in which they inhere, and also
certain means or stimuli to such analysis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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