The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal BehaviorYerkes, Robert Mearns
Science
The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior
Yerkes, Robert Mearns
Animal behavior; Dancing mice
10 17 8 2 8 2
Each of these series consisted of 20 tests instead of 10. As a result of
the arrangement of the lights just mentioned, the green appeared to me
very much brighter than the red when it was on the right and very much
darker when it was on the left. If this were true for the mouse also, it
is difficult to see how it could successfully depend upon brightness for
guidance in its choices. Such dependence would cause it to choose now the
green, now the red.
The first four series of green-red tests so clearly demonstrated
discrimination, of some sort, that it was at once necessary to alter the
conditions of the experiment. The only criticism of the above method of
excluding brightness discrimination, of which I could think, was that the
red at no time had been brighter than the green. In other words, that
despite a value of 1800 candle meters for the red and only 18 candle
meters for the green, the latter still appeared the brighter to the mouse.
To meet this objection, I made the extreme brightness values 1 and 1800
candle meters in some of the later series, of which the results appear in
Table 24. From day to day different degrees of brightness were used, as is
indicated in the second column of the table. Instead of having first one
color and then the other the brighter, after the fourth series I changed
the position of the lights each time the position of the filters was
changed; hence, the table states a certain brightness value for each color
instead of for each electric-box.
Series 5 to 14 so clearly indicated discrimination, that it seemed
necessary to devise some other means than that of changing the
brightnesses of the colored lights themselves to test the assumption that
the animals were choosing the brighter light. I therefore removed the
light filters so that the colors which had been present as conditions of
discrimination were lacking, and arranged the apparatus so that first one
box, then the other, was illuminated the more brightly. The purpose of
this was to discover whether as the result of their green-red training the
mice had acquired the habit of choosing uniformly either the lighter or
the darker box. One series was given under the conditions of illumination
specified in Table 24 with the result that the brighter box was chosen
eight times in ten by No. 151 and every time by No. 152. Since neither of
these individuals had previously been trained by white-black tests to go
to the white, and since, furthermore, the dancers usually manifest a
slight preference for the lower instead of the higher illumination, this
result may be interpreted as indicative of dependence upon brightness in
the previous color tests. It looks very much indeed as if the green had
been chosen, not because of its greenness, but on account of its
relatively greater brightness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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