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
Systematic tests were made with No. 4 from the 3d to the 12th of February,
inclusive, 1906. Each day the mouse was permitted to find his way to the
nest-box through one of the small boxes ten times in succession. Usually
the experimenter rang the bell alternately for the box on the left and the
box on the right. The time required for such a series of experiments
varied, according to the rapidity with which the mouse made his choice,
from ten to thirty minutes. If in these experiments the animal approached
and entered the right, or soundless box, directly, the choice indicated
nothing so far as ability to hear is concerned; if it entered the wrong,
or sounding box, despite the ringing of the bell, it indicated either the
lack of the influence of experience or inability to hear the sound; but if
it regularly avoided the box-which-sounded it thus gave evidence of
ability to hear the sound of the bell. The purpose of the test was to
determine, not whether the mouse could learn, but whether it could hear.
For ten successive days this experiment was carried on with No. 4 without
the least indication of increasing ability to avoid the wrong box by the
association of the sound of the bell with the disagreeable electric shock
and failure to escape to the nest-box. In fact, the experiment was
discontinued because it became evident that an impossible task had been
set for the mouse. Day by day as the tests were in progress I noticed that
the animal became increasingly afraid of the entrances to the small boxes;
it seemed absolutely helpless in the face of the situation. Partly because
of the definiteness of the negative results obtained with No. 4 and partly
because of the cruelty of subjecting an animal to disagreeable conditions
which it is unable to avoid, the experiment was not repeated with other
individuals. I have never conducted an experiment which gave me as much
discomfort as this; it was like being set to whip a deaf child because it
did not learn to respond to stimuli which it could not feel.
By a very similar method No. 18 was tested for his sensitiveness to the
noise and jar from the induction apparatus which was used in connection
with many of my experiments on vision and the modifiability of behavior.
In this experiment the wrong box was indicated by the buzzing sound of the
apparatus and the slight vibrations which resulted from it. Although No.
18 was tested, as was No. 4, for ten successive days, ten trials each day,
it gave no evidence of ability to avoid the box-which-buzzed.
Since both direct and indirect methods of testing the hearing of the
dancer have uniformly given negative results, in the case of mice more
than five weeks old, I feel justified in concluding that they are totally
deaf and not merely irresponsive to sounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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