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 results of the continuous training method for these two mice were so
strikingly different from those yielded by the other methods that I at
once suspected the influence of some factor other than that of the number
of tests per day. The ages of Nos. 51 and 60 at the time of their tests
were twenty-two and seventeen weeks, respectively, whereas all the
individuals used in connection with the other efficiency tests were four
weeks of age. It seemed possible that the slow habit formation exhibited
in the continuous training experiments might be due to the greater age of
the mice. I therefore selected a healthy active female which was only
eight weeks old, and tried to train her by the continuous training method.
With this individual, No. 87, the results were even more discouraging than
those previously obtained, for she was still imperfect in her
discrimination at the end of two hundred and ten tests. At that point the
experiment was interrupted, and it seemed scarcely worth while to continue
it further at a later date. The evidence of the extremely low efficiency
of the continuous method in comparison with the other methods which we
have been considering is so conclusive that further comment seems
superfluous.
We are now in a position to compare the results of the several methods of
training which have been applied to the dancer, and to attempt to get
satisfactory quantitative expressions of the efficiency of each method. I
have arranged in Table 46 the general averages yielded by the four
methods. Although these general results hide certain important facts which
will be exhibited later, they clearly indicate that an increase in the
number of tests per day does not necessarily result in an increase in the
rapidity of habit formation. Should we attempt, on superficial
examination, to interpret the figures of this table, we would doubtless
say that in efficiency the two-five-test method stands first, the
continuous-test method last, while the ten-test and twenty-test methods
occupy intermediate positions.
TABLE 46
EFFICIENCY OF TRAINING
Number of Errors in White-Black Series for Different Methods of
Training
SETS OF 10 2 OR 5 TESTS 10 TESTS 20 TESTS 100 OR MORE
PER DAY PER DAY PER DAY TESTS PER DAY
A 5.8 5.8 5.9 5.3
B 5.7 5.7 5.9 5.0
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