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 brightness discrimination tests demanded, in addition to motives for
choice, adequate precautions against discrimination by other than visual
factors, and, for that matter, by other visual factors than that of
brightness. The mouse might choose, for example, not the white or the
black box, but the box which was to the right or to the left, in
accordance with its experience in the previous test. This would be
discrimination by position. As a matter of fact, the animals have a strong
tendency at first to go uniformly either to the right or to the left
entrance. This tendency will be exhibited in the results of the tests.
Again, discrimination might depend upon the odors of the cardboards or
upon slight differences in their shape, texture, or position. Before
conclusive evidence of brightness discrimination could be obtained, all of
these and other possibilities of discrimination had to be eliminated by
check tests. I shall describe the various precautions taken in the
experiments to guard against errors in interpretation, in order to show
the lengths to which an experimenter may be driven in his search for
safely interpretable results.
To exclude choice by position, the cardboards were moved from one
electric-box to the other. When the change was made regularly, so that
white was alternately on the right and the left, the mouse soon learned to
go alternately to the right box and the left without stopping to notice
the visual factor. This was prevented by changing the position of the
cardboards irregularly.
Discrimination by the odor, texture, shape, and position of the cardboards
was excluded by the use of different kinds of cardboards, by changing the
form and position of them in check tests, and by coating them with
shellac.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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