Animal intelligence: Experimental studiesThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
Animal intelligence: Experimental studies
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Animal intelligence; Psychology, Comparative
But in giving attention its deserts we need not forget that it is not
here comparable to the whole of human attention. Our attention to the
other player and the ball in a game of tennis _is_ like the animal’s
attention, but our attention to a passage in Hegel, or the memory which
flits through our mind, or the song we hear, or the player we idly watch,
is _not_. There ought, I think, to be a separate name for attention
when working for immediate practical associations. It is a different
species from that which holds objects so that we may define them, think
about them, remember them, etc., and the difference is, as our previous
sentence shows, not that between voluntary and involuntary attention. The
cat watching me for signs of my walking to the cage with fish is not in
the condition of the man watching a ball game, but in that of the player
watching the ball speeding toward him. There is a notable difference in
the permanence of the impression. The man watching the game can remember
just how that fly was hit and how the fielder ran for it, though he
bestowed only a slight quantity of attention on the matter, while the
fielder may attend to the utmost to the ball and yet not remember at all
how it came or how he ran for it. The one sort of attention leads you to
_think_ about a thing, the other to _act_ with reference to it. We must
be careful to remember that when we say that the cat attended to what was
said, we do not mean that he thereby established an idea of it. Animals
are not proved to form separate ideas of sense-impressions because they
attend to them, for the kind of attention they give is the kind which,
when given by men, results in practical associations, not in establishing
ideas of objects. If attention rendered clear the idea, we should not
have the phenomena of incomplete forgetfulness lately mentioned. The
animal would get a definite idea of just the exact thing done and would
do it or nothing. The human development of attention is in closest
connection with the acquisition of a stock of free ideas.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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