Three words were thereupon whispered in his ear, which he was asked to
spell in accordance with the method described on page 21. Since he had
to indicate first the row, and then the place in the row occupied by the
letter, it took two answers to indicate the position of each letter. I
acted as questioner. The ordering of the table of letters was unknown to
me, except the position of the letter "a", which naturally came first,
and the place of the letter "s", concerning whose position I had
purposely inquired. The words chosen for this experiment were "Arm",
"Rom" (Rome) and "Hans". The horse responded incorrectly in the case of
every letter which was unknown to the questioner. "A" and "s" alone were
given correctly. Thus in spelling the word "Rom" the horse responded
with the series 3, 4; 3, 4; 5, 4; 5, 4; i. e. "jjst", instead of the
correct series: 4, 6; 4, 2; 3, 7. I later selected three other words,
the spelling of which involved the tapping of thirty-two numbers on the
part of Hans, and whose position I had carefully ascertained beforehand.
When these were given to the horse to spell, he responded promptly
without a single error. Evidently Hans was unable to spell without
assistance of some sort from the questioner.
The horse's reputed aptitude in computation was tested in the following
way. Mr. von Osten whispered a number in the horse's ear so that none of
the persons present could hear. Thereupon I did likewise. Hans was asked
to add the two. Since each of the experimenters knew only his own
number, the sum, if known to anyone, could be known to Hans alone. Every
such test was immediately repeated with the result known to the
experimenters. In 31 tests in which the method was procedure without
knowledge, 3 of the horse's answers were correct, whereas in the 31
tests in which the method was procedure with knowledge, 29 of his
responses were correct. Since the three correct answers in the cases in
which procedure was without knowledge evidently were accidental, the
results of this series of experiments show that Hans was unable to solve
arithmetical problems.
For the purpose of discovering whether the horse could at least count,
the Russian kindergarten device, which Mr. von Osten had used in
training, was utilized. The machine was placed before the horse, but the
experimenter turned his back upon it. Before each test, a number of
balls were pushed to one side and Hans's problem was to indicate the
number thus separated. Each test was repeated with procedure with
knowledge. Of eight such experiments Hans responded successfully every
time procedure was with knowledge but failed every time procedure was
without knowledge. Thus 7 balls were at one time designated as 9 and
later as 14, while 6 were at first designated as 12, and later as 10.
Since all these errors could not be accounted for on the ground of
miscounts on the part of the horse, it was evident that Hans is quite
unable to count.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account