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 vision tests described in this chapter were made in a room
which is lighted from the south only, with the experiment box directed
away from the windows. The light from the windows shone upon the
cardboards at the entrances to the electric-boxes, not into the eyes of
the mouse as it approached them. Each mouse used in the experiments was
given a series of ten tests in succession daily. The experiment was
conducted as follows. A dancer was placed in _A_, where it usually ran
about restlessly until it happened to find its way into _B_. Having
discovered that the swing door at _I_ could be pushed open, the animal
seemed to take satisfaction in passing through into _B_ as soon as it had
been placed in or had returned to _A_. In _B_, choice of two entrances,
one of which was brighter than the other, was forced by the animal's need
of space for free movement. If the right box happened to be chosen, the
mouse returned to _A_ and was ready for another test; if it entered the
wrong box, the electric shock was given, and it was compelled to retreat
from the box and enter the other one instead. In the early tests with an
individual, a series sometimes covered from twenty to thirty minutes; in
later tests, provided the condition of discrimination was favorable, it
did not occupy more than ten minutes.
To exhibit the methods of keeping the records of these experiments and
certain features of the results, two sample record sheets are reproduced
below. The first of these sheets, Table 6, represents the results given by
No. 5, a female,[1] in her first series of white-black tests. Table 7
presents the results of the eleventh series of tests given to the same
individual.
[Footnote 1: It is to be remembered that the even numbers always designate
males; the odd numbers, females.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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