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
As my plan involved the execution of precisely the same set of tests with
at least seventy individuals whose age, history, and past experience were
accurately known, and of which some had to be kept for nineteen months
before they could be trained, the amount of labor and the risk of mishap
which it entailed were great. To make possible the completion of the
investigation within two years, I accumulated healthy individuals for
several months without training any of them. In March, 1907, I had
succeeded in completing the tests for the age of one month, and I had on
hand for the remaining tests almost a hundred individuals, whose ages
ranged from a few days to eighteen months. Had everything gone well, the
work would have been finished within six months. Suddenly, and without
discoverable external cause, my mice began to die of an intestinal
trouble, and despite all my efforts to check the disease by changing food
supply and environment, all except a single pair died within a few weeks.
Thus ended a number of experiments whose final results I had expected to
be able to present in this volume. However, the work which I have done is
still of value, for the single pair of survivors have made possible the
continuance of my tests with other individuals of the same line of descent
as those which perished, and I have to regret only the loss of time and
labor.
As I have on hand results for ten individuals of the age of one month, and
for four individuals of the age of four months, it has seemed desirable to
state the problem, method, and incomplete results of this study of the
relation of modifiability to age. The indices of modifiability for these
two groups of dancers differ so strikingly that I feel justified in
persisting in my efforts to obtain comparable data for the seven ages
which have been mentioned.
TABLE 52
PLASTICITY (RELATION or MODIFIABILITY TO AGE)
Number of Errors in Successive Daily Series of Ten White-Black
Tests, with Dancers Four Months Old
SERIES MALES FEMALES
NO. 76 NO. 78 AV. NO. 75 NO. 77 AV. GENERAL AV.
A 7 7 7.0 4 8 6.0 6.50
B 8 6 7.0 6 5 5.5 6.25
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