Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
presence of an idea of an experience attributed to the past.
To this proposition two corollaries may be added. First, these phenomena
of incomplete forgetfulness extend the evidence that animals do not have
a stock of independent ideas, the return of which, plus past associates,
equals memory. Second, there is, properly speaking, no continuity in
their mental streams. The present thought does not clutch the past to
its bosom or hold the future in its womb. The animal’s self is not a
being ‘looking before and after,’ but a direct practical association of
feelings and impulses. So far as experiences come continuously, they may
be said to form a continuous mental life, but there is no continuity
imposed from within. The feelings of its own body are always present, and
impressions from outside may come as they come to us. When the habit of
attending to the elements of its associations and raising them up into
the life of free ideas is acquired, these permanent bodily associations
may become the basis of a feeling of self-hood and the trains of ideas
may be felt as a continuous life.
INHIBITION OF INSTINCTS BY HABIT
One very important result of association remains to be considered, its
inhibition of instincts and previous associations. An animal who has
become habituated to getting out of a box by pulling a loop and opening
the door will do so even though the hole in the top of the box be
uncovered, whereas, if, in early trials, you had left any such hole, he
would have taken the instinctive way and crawled through it. Instances of
this sort of thing are well-nigh ubiquitous. It is a tremendous factor
in animal life, and the strongest instincts may thus be annulled. The
phenomenon has been already recognized in the literature of the subject,
a convenient account being found in James’ ‘Psychology,’ Vol. II, pages
394-397. In addition to such accounts, one may note that the influence
of association is exerted in two ways. The instinct may wane by not
being used, because the animal forms the habit of meeting the situation
in a different way, or it may be actually inhibited. An instance of the
former sort is found in the history of a cat which learns to pull a loop
and so escape from a box whose top is covered by a board nailed over it.
If, after enough trials, you remove a piece of the board covering the
box, the cat, when put in, will still pull the loop instead of crawling
out through the opening thus made. But, at any time, if she happens to
notice the hole, she _may_ make use of it. An instance of the second
sort is that of a chick which has been put on a box with a wire screen
at its edge, preventing her from jumping directly down, as she would
instinctively do, and forcing her to jump to another box on one side
of it and thence down. In the experiments which I made, the chick was
prevented by a second screen from jumping directly from the second box
also. That is, if in the accompanying figure, A is a box 34 inches high,
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