After two hundred and fifty trials on problem 2 had been given Julius,
it seemed desirable to introduce a radical change in method in order to
stimulate him to maximal effort. It was therefore decided to force him
to make a round trip through the apparatus in connection with each
choice, and to let this forced labor serve, in the place of confinement,
as punishment for mistakes. This new method yielded peculiar and
characteristic results. They differ from those previously obtained
largely because of the orang utan's remarkably strong tendency to
reenter the box through which he had just passed. This occurred so
persistently, as may be seen in table 9 (June 17, second series, June
18, etc.), that a further modification of method was introduced in that
after the same wrong box had been entered five times in succession, the
experimenter on the next choice of the box confined the animal for a
stated interval, say sixty seconds, in it, and then allowed it to escape
by way of the exit door and choose repeatedly until it finally located
the right box. Were it not for this particular feature of the method,
the number of choices recorded after June 17 would unquestionably be
very much greater than the table indicates.
The new method proved a severe test of the orang utan's patience and
perseverance, for he had to work much harder than formerly for his
reward, and often became much fatigued before completing the regular
series of ten trials. Early in the use of this method, he developed the
habit of rolling around from exit door to starting point by a series of
somersaults. When especially discouraged he would often bump his head
against the floor so hard that I could hear the dull thud. As has been
noted, I found it desirable to vary the procedure repeatedly. It proved
especially interesting to give one series per day with the round trip as
punishment and another series with confinement as punishment.
Day after day, as the experiment progressed, slight or great
fluctuations of the ratios of right to wrong choices appeared, but
without consistent improvement. There was, to be sure, as the last
column of table 9 shows, a radical improvement during the first six
hundred and fifty trials, for the number of right choices per series
increased from 0 to 8. But, as the observations were continued from day
to day, it became more and more evident that the animal was merely
passing from tendency to tendency--method to method--mixing tendencies,
and occasionally developing new ones, without approach to the solution
of the problem. This fact would have led me to discontinue the work much
earlier than I actually did had it not been for the peculiarity of the
results obtained with problem 1. It seemed not improbable that at any
time Julius might succeed in perfectly solving this problem over night
precisely as he had solved the first problem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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