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
The problem method, of which the ladder and door-opening tests of the
preceding chapter are examples, has yielded interesting results concerning
the individual initiative, ingenuity, motor ability, and ways of learning
of the dancer; but it has not furnished us with accurate measurements of
the rapidity of learning or of the permanency of the effects of training.
In this chapter I shall therefore present the results of labyrinth
experiments which were planned as means of measuring the intelligence of
the dancer.
The four labyrinths which have been used in the investigation may be
designated as _A, B, C,_ and _D_. They differ from one another in the
character of their errors, as well as in the number of wrong choices of a
path which the animal might make on its way from entrance to exit. In the
use of the labyrinth method, as in the case of the discrimination method
of earlier chapters, the steps by which a satisfactory form of labyrinth
for testing the dancer was discovered are quite as interesting and
important for those who have an intelligent appreciation of the problems
and methods of animal psychology as are the particular results which were
obtained. For this reason, I shall describe the various forms of labyrinth
in the order in which they were used, whether they proved satisfactory or
not. At the outset of this part of my investigation, it was my purpose to
compare directly the capacity for habit formation in the dancer with that
of the common mouse. This proved impracticable because the same labyrinth
is not suited to the motor tendencies of both kinds of mice.
[Illustration: FIGURE 25.--Labyrinth A. _I_. entrance; _O_, exit; 1, 2, 3,
4, blind alleys.]
The first of the four labyrinths, A, appears in ground plan in Figure 25.
It was constructed of wood, as were the other labyrinths also, and
measured 60 cm. in length and width, and 10 cm. in depth. The outside
alleys were 5 cm. wide. In the figure, _I_ marks the starting point or
entrance to the maze, and _O_ the exit through which the mouse was
permitted to pass into its nest-box. Any turn in the wrong direction which
the animal made in its progress from entrance to exit was recorded as an
error. The four errors, exclusive of the mistake of turning back, which
were possible in this labyrinth, are indicated in the figure by the
numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4. By retracing its steps a mouse might repeat any
one or all of these errors, and add to them the error of turning back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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