Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
The time-curves for chicks 90, 91, 92, 93, 94 and 95, all 2-8 days old
when experimented on, follow on page 65. The scale is the same as that
in the curves of the cats and dogs. Besides these simple acts, which any
average chick will accidentally hit upon and associate, there are, in
the records of my preliminary study of animal intelligence, a multitude
of all sorts of associations which some chicks have happened to form.
Chicks have escaped from confinement by stepping on a little platform in
the back of the box, by jumping up and pulling a string like that in D,
by pecking at a door, by climbing up a spiral staircase and out through
a hole in the wall, by doing this and then in addition walking across a
ladder for a foot to another wall from which they jump down, etc. Not
every chick will happen upon the right way in these cases, but the chicks
who did happen upon it all formed the associations perfectly after enough
trials.
The behavior of the chicks shows the same general character as that
of the cats, conditioned, of course, by the different nature of the
instinctive impulses. Take a chick put in T (inclined plane) for an
example. When taken from the food and other chicks and dropped into the
pen he shows evident signs of discomfort; he runs back and forth, peeping
loudly, trying to squeeze through any openings there may be, jumping up
to get over the wall, and pecking at the bars or screen, if such separate
him from the other chicks. Finally, in his general running around he goes
up the inclined plane a way. He may come down again, or he may go on up
far enough to see over the top of the wall. If he does, he will probably
go running up the rest of the way and jump down. With further trials he
gains more and more of an impulse to walk up an inclined plane when he
sees it, while the vain running and pecking, etc., are stamped out by the
absence of any sequent pleasure. Finally, the chick goes up the plane as
soon as put in. In scientific terms this history means that the chick,
when confronted by loneliness and confining walls, responds by those acts
which in similar conditions in nature would be likely to free him. Some
one of these acts leads him to the successful act, and the resulting
pleasure stamps it in. Absence of pleasure stamps all others out. The
case is just the same as with dogs and cats. The time-curves are shown in
Fig. 18.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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