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 measurements of memory which were made in connection with color
discrimination experiments are markedly different from those which were
obtained in the brightness tests. As might have been anticipated (?), in
view of the extreme difficulty with which the dancer learns to
discriminate colors, the habit of discriminating between qualitatively
different visual conditions does not persist very long. I have never
obtained evidence of a perfect habit after an interval of more than two
weeks, and usually, as is apparent from Table 48, the tests indicated very
imperfect memory at the end of that interval. It seems probable that even
in these so-called color tests discrimination is partly by brightness
difference, and that the imperfection of the habit and its short duration
are due to the fact that the basis of discrimination is inadequate. This
is the only explanation which I have to offer for the difference which has
been demonstrated to exist between the duration of brightness
discrimination habits and color discrimination habits.
The duration of a discrimination habit having been measured with a fair
degree of accuracy, I undertook the task of ascertaining whether training
whose results have wholly disappeared, so far as memory tests are in
question, influences the re-acquisition of the same habit. Can a habit be
re-acquired with greater facility than it was originally acquired? Is re-
learning easier than learning? To obtain an answer to the question which
may be asked in these different forms, ten individuals were experimented
with in accordance with a method whose chief features are now to be
stated. In each of these ten individuals a perfect white-black habit was
established by the use of the standard series of tests the order of which
is given in Table 12. At the expiration of a rest interval of eight weeks
precisely the same series of tests were repeated as memory and re-training
tests. In this repetition, the preliminary series, _A_ and _B_, served as
memory tests, and the subsequent training series, as re-training series.
[Illustration: FIGURE 32.--Error curves plotted from the data given by ten
dancers in white-black discrimination tests. The solid line ([Symbol:
solid line]) is the error curve of the original learning process; the
broken line (------) is that of the re-learning process, after an interval
of eight weeks.]
The striking results of this investigation of re-learning are exhibited in
the curves of learning and re-learning of Figure 32. These curves make it
appear that the mice re-acquired the white-black discrimination habit much
more readily than they had originally acquired it. But in addition to
furnishing the basis for some such statement as the foregoing, the curves
suggest a serious criticism of the experiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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