FOOTNOTES
[1] ‘Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals’ (’98), ‘The Instinctive Reactions of Young Chicks’ (’99), ‘A Note on the Psychology of Fishes’ (’99), and ‘The Mental Life of the Monkeys’ (’01). I have added a theoretical paper, ‘The Evolution of the Human Intellect,’ which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1901, and which was a direct outgrowth of the experimental work. I am indebted to the management of the Psychological Review, and that of the American Naturalist and Popular Science Monthly, for permission to reprint the three shorter papers.
[2] Unless one assumes telepathic influences.
[3] Reason in Common Sense, p. 154 ff.
[4] This chapter originally appeared as Monograph Supplement No. 8 of the Psychological Review.
[5] I do not mean that scientists have been too credulous with regard to spiritualism, but am referring to the cases where ten or twenty scientists have been sent to observe some trick-performance by a spiritualistic ‘medium,’ and have all been absolutely confident that they understood the secret of its performance, each of them giving a totally different explanation.
[6] The phrase ‘practically utter hunger’ has given rise to misunderstandings. I have been accused of experimenting with starving or half-starved animals, with animals brought to a state of fear and panic by hunger, and the like!
The desideratum is, of course, to have the motive as nearly as possible of equal strength in each experiment with any one animal with any one act. That is, the animal should be as hungry at the tenth or twentieth trial as at the first. To attain this, the animal was given after each ‘success’ only a very small bit of food as a reward (say, for a young cat, one quarter of a cubic centimeter of fish or meat) and tested not too many times on any one day. ‘Utter hunger’ means that no diminution in his appetite was noted and that at the close of the experiment for the day he would still eat a hearty meal. After the experiments for the day were done, the cats received abundant food to maintain health, growth and spirits, but commonly somewhat less than they would of their own accord have taken. No one of the many visitors to the room mentioned anything extraordinary or distressful in the animals’ condition. There were no signs of fear or panic.
Possibly I was wrong in choosing the term ‘utter hunger’ to denote the hunger of an animal in good, but not pampered, condition and without food for fourteen hours. It is not sure, however, that the term ‘utter hunger’ is inappropriate. The few reports made of experiments in going without food seem to show that, in health, the feeling of hunger reaches its maximum intensity very early. It is of course not at all the same thing as the complex of discomforts produced by long-continued insufficiency of food. Hunger is not at all a synonym for starvation.
[7] The experiments now to be described were for the most part made in the Psychological Laboratory of Columbia University during the year ’97-’98, but a few of them were made in connection with a general preliminary investigation of animal psychology undertaken at Harvard University in the previous year.
[8] No. 7 hit the string in his general struggling, apparently utterly without design. He did not realize that the door was open till, two seconds after it had fallen, he happened to look that way.
[9] No. 6, in trying to crawl out at the top of the box, put its paw in above the string. It fell down and thus pulled the string. It did not claw at it, and it was 16 seconds before it noticed that the door was open. In all the other times that it escaped the movement was made in the course of promiscuous scrambling, never in anything like the same way that No. 2 made it.
[10] No. 3 did not go out until 12 seconds had elapsed after it had pulled the string.
[11] The back of the pen adjoined the elevator shaft, being separated from it by a partition 33 inches high. No. 2 heard the elevator coming up and put his paws up on the top of this partition so as to look over. In so doing he knocked the fastening of the cord at that end and opened the door. He did not turn to come out, and I shut the door again.
[12] FF was a box 40 × 21 × 24 inches, the door of which could be opened by putting the paw out between the bars to its right and pulling a loop which hung 16 inches above the floor, 4 inches out from the box and 6 inches to the right of the door.
[13] KKK was box K with both bolts removed. All that had to be done was to poke the paw out at one side of the door and press down a little bar of wood.
[14] The cats and chick were left in for two minutes at each trial, the dogs for from one to one and a half minutes.
[15] One result of the application of experimental method to the study of the intellect of animals was the distinction of learning by the selection of impulses or acts from learning by the selection of ideas. The usual method of learning in the case of animals other than man was shown by the studies reprinted in this volume to be the direct selection, in a certain situation, of a desirable response and its association with that situation, not the indirect selection of such a response by the selection of some idea which then of itself produced the response. The animals did not usually behave as if they thought of getting freedom or food in a certain way and were thereby moved to do so, but as if the stimulus in question made immediate connection with the response itself or an intimately associated impulse.
The experiments had in this respect both a negative or destructive and a positive or constructive meaning. On the one hand, they showed that animal learning was not homologous with human association of ideas; that animal learning was not human learning minus abstract and conceptual thought, but was on a still ‘lower’ level. On the other hand, the first positive evidence that animals could, under certain circumstances, learn, as man so commonly does, by the indirect connection of a response with a situation through some non-sensory relic or representative of the latter, came from my experiments.
It was perhaps natural that the more exciting denial of habitual learning by ideas should have attracted more attention than the somewhat tedious experiments to prove that under certain conditions they could so learn. At all events, a perverse tradition seems to have grown up to the effect that I denied the possibility of animals having images or learning in any case by representative thinking.
There is some excuse for this tradition in the fact that whereas the proof that the habitual learning of these dogs and cats did not require ‘ideas’ is clear and emphatic, my evidence that certain features of their behavior did require ‘ideas’ is complicated and imperfect.
The fact seems to be that a ‘free idea’ comes in the animals or in man only as a result of a somewhat elaborate process of analysis or extraction from a gross total sensory process. The primary level or grade of experience, common to animals and little babies, comprises states of mind such as an adult man gets if lost in anger, fear, suffocation, dyspepsia, looking at a panorama of unknown objects with head upside down, smelling the mixture of odors of a soap factory, driving a golf ball, dashing to the net in a game of tennis, warding off a blow, or swimming under water. For a man to get a distinct controllable percept of approaching asthma, of a carpet loom seen upside down, or of a successful ‘carry through,’ or ‘smash’ or ‘lob,’ so that one knows just what one is experiencing or doing, and can recall just what one experienced or did, requires further experience of the element in question—contemplation of it in isolation or dealings with it in many varied connections. So for a cat to get a distinct controllable percept of a loop, or of its own clawing or nosing or pulling, it must have the capacity to analyze such elements out of the total gross complexes in which they inhere, and also certain means or stimuli to such analysis.
This capacity or tendency the cats and dogs do, in my opinion, possess, though in a far less degree than the average child. They also suffer from lack of stimuli to the exercise of the capacity. Their confinement, for the most part, to the direct sensory experience of things and acts, is due in part to the weakness of the capacity or tendency of their neurones to act in great detail, and in part to the lack of such stimuli as visual exploration of things in detail, manual manipulation of the same thing in many ways, and the identification of elements of objects and acts by language. They get few free ideas because they are less ready than man to get them under the same conditions and because their instinctive behavior and social environment offer conditions that are less favorable. The task of getting an animal to have some free ideational representative of a red loop or of pushing up a button with the nose may be compared with that of getting a very stupid boy to have a free ideational representative of acceleration, or of the act of sounding th. The difference between them and man which is so emphasized in the text, though real and of enormous practical importance, is thus not at all a mysterious gap or trackless desert. We can see our way from animal to human learning.
[16] A man may learn to swim from the general feeling, “I want to be able to swim.” While learning, he may think of this desire, of the difficulties of the motion, of the instruction given him, or of anything which may turn up in his mind. This is all extraneous and is not concerned in the acquisition of the association. Nothing like it, of course, goes on in the animal’s mind. Imagine a man thrown into the water repeatedly, and gradually floundering to the shore in better and better style until finally, when thrown in, he swims off perfectly, and deprive the man of all extraneous feelings, and you have an approximate homologue of the process in animals. He feels discomfort, certain impulses to flounder around, some of which are the right ones to move his body to the shore. The pleasure which follows stamps in these, and gradually the proper movements are made immediately on feeling the sense-impression of surrounding water.
[17] See 10 in A, 3 in A, 10 in D; 10 in C, 4 in C, 3 in C; 6, 2, 5, 4 in E; 4 in F; 10 in H, 3 in H; 3, 4, 5, in I; 4 in G, 3 in G; 3 in K; 10 in L; dog 1 in N and CC; dog 1 in G and O.
[18] This chapter appeared originally in the Psychological Review, Vol. VI, No. 3.
[19] This double rating is necessary because of the fact that the chick often gives several distinct pecks in a single reaction. The ‘times reacted to’ mean the number of different times that the chicks noticed the color.
[20] The crude experiments reported in this and the preceding paragraphs were not made to test the presence of color vision proper, that is, of differentiation of two colors of the same brightness, but only to ascertain how chicks reacted to ordinary colored objects. It was, however, almost certain from the relative frequency of the reactions that the intensity factor was not the cause of the response. For example, if it had been, black on white and yellow on black should have been pecked at oftener.
[21] This chapter appeared originally in the American Naturalist, Vol. XXXIII, No. 396.
[22] This chapter appeared originally as Monograph Supplement No. 15 to the Psychological Review.
[23] [Pp. 20 to 155] of this volume.
[24] American Journal of Psychology, Vol. X, pp. 256-279; Vol. XI, pp. 80-100, 131-165; Vol. XII, pp. 206-239.
[25] Practically a memory trial of CC, done January 21, 1900.
[26] Did it by pulling door and thus shaking lever.
[27] Practically a memory trial of SS.
[28] Did it by pulling door and biting wire.
[29] This, I regret, was not done [E. L. T., 1911].
[30] The acts and the number of chances to see me do each and the results were as follows; details can be found on the table on [page 226]. F = failed after tuition.
| No. 1.— | MM | 21 | F |
| Theta | 5 | F | |
| 10 | F | ||
| RR | 4 | F | |
| W | 9 | did in .22 | |
| Delta | 15 | F | |
| Epsilon | 40 | F | |
| QQ (f) | 15 | F | |
| QQ (c) | 1 | did in 2.20 | |
| No. 3.— | Theta | 25 | did in 3.00. |
| 40 | F | ||
| Gamma | 30 | F | |
| Epsilon | 25 | F | |
| QQ (ff) | 5 | F | |
| QQ (c) | 20 | F, did in 1.30, F, 5 F, 5 F | |
| QQ (e) | 5 | F, did in 2.00 |
[31] He did push it once with his nose.
[32] I inadvertently pulled the nail out in one of five cases when I was fingering it to see if attracting his attention to it would lead to the act.
[33] Not significant. Due to inattention. Was temporary.
[34] Pulled wire and door.
[35] Pushed with head by chance.
[36] Reached in at 9:30 and took out the banana, which I replaced.
[37] Did by constant pulling at the door.
[38] Did touch nail four times.
[39] Did by pulling hard on wire (not loop); the loop got loose from nail.
[40] Did by pulling at the door till the bar was worked around.
[41] The ‘say,’ may be replaced by some bodily attitude, facial expression, or other verbal formula that identifies the situation as one to be responded to by speech.
[42] This would, of course, result from a well-known corollary of the laws of habit.
[43] In Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, pp. 591-599.
[44] Professor Smith’s own experiments illustrate this.
[45] Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Holl, 1898, p. 323 ff.
[46] This chapter appeared originally in the Popular Science Monthly, Nov., 1901.