Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The animal's instinctive impulses do often lead it to accidentally
perform these several acts one after another, and repeated accidental
successes do in some of these cases cause the acts to be done at last
in fairly quick succession. But we see clearly that the acts are not
thought about or done with anything like a rational comprehension of
the situation, for the time taken to learn the thing is much longer
than all three elements would take if tackled separately; and even
after the animal has reached a minimum time in doing the acts, he does
not do the things in the same order, and often repeats one of the acts
over and over again, though it has already attained its end.
The second set comprised experiments on the so-called "memory" of
animals. I will describe only one out of many which agree with it. A
kitten had been trained to the habit of climbing the wire-netting
front of its cage whenever I approached. I then trained her to climb
up at the words "I must feed those cats." This was done by uttering
them and then in ten seconds going up to the cage and holding a bit of
fish to her at its top. After this had been done about forty times she
reached a point where she would climb up at the signal about fifty per
cent of the times. I then introduced a new element by sometimes
saying, "I must feed those cats," as before, and feeding her, and at
other times saying, "I will not feed them," and remaining still in my
chair. At first the kitten felt no difference, and would climb up just
as often at the wrong signal as at the right. But gradually (it took
about four hundred and fifty trials) the failure to get any pleasure
from the act of climbing up at the wrong signal stamped out the
impulse to do so, while the pleasure sequent upon the act of climbing
up at the other signal made that her invariable response to it. Here,
as elsewhere, the absence of reason was shown by the cat's failure at
any point in these hundreds of trials to think about the matter, and
make the easy inference that one set of sounds meant food, while the
other did not. But still better proof appears in what is to follow.
After an interval of eighty days I tried her again to see how
permanent the association between the signal and act was. It was
permanent to the extent that what took three hundred and eighty trials
before took only fifty this time, for after fifty trials with the "I
will not feed them" signal, mixed up with a lot of the other, the cat
once more attained perfect discrimination. But it was not permanent in
the sense that the cat at the first or tenth or twentieth trial felt,
as a remembering, reasoning consciousness surely ought to feel, "Why,
that lot of sounds means that he won't come up with fish." For instead
of at first forgetting and for a while climbing up at the _I will not
feed them_, and then remembering its previous experience and at once
stopping the performance it had before learned was useless, the cat
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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