Instinctive Reactions to Distance, Direction, Size, etc.
I have purposely chosen this awkward heading rather than the simple one, Space-Perception, because I do not wish to imply that there is in the young chick such consciousness of space-facts as there is in human beings. All that will be shown here is that he reacts appropriately in the presence of space-facts, reacts in a fashion which would in the case of a man go with genuine perception of space.
If one puts a chick on top of a box in sight of his fellows below, the chick will regulate his conduct by the height of the box. To be definite, we may take the average chick of about 95 hours. If the height is less than 10 inches, he will jump down as soon as you put him up. At 16 inches he will jump in from 5 seconds to 3 or 4 minutes. At 22 inches he will still jump down, but after more hesitation. At 27½ inches 6 chicks out of eight at this age jumped within 5 minutes. At 39 inches the chick will not jump down. The numerical values given here would, of course, vary with the health, development, hunger and degree of lonesomeness of the chick. All that they are supposed to show is that at any given age the chick without experience of heights regulates his conduct rather accurately in accord with the space-fact of distance which confronts him. The chick does not peck at objects remote from him, does not, for instance, confuse a bird a score of feet away with a fly near by, or try to get the moon inside his bill. Moreover, he reacts in pecking with considerable accuracy at the very start. Lloyd Morgan has noted that in his very first efforts the chick often fails to seize the object, though he hits it, and on this ground has denied the perfection of the instinct. But, as a matter of fact, the pecking reaction may be as perfect at birth as it is after 10 or 12 days’ experience. It certainly is not perfect then. I took nine chicks from 10 to 14 days old and placed them one at a time on a clear surface over which were scattered grains of cracked wheat (the food they had been eating in this same way for a week) and watched the accuracy of their pecking. Out of 214 objects pecked at, 159 were seized, 55 were not. Out of the 159 that were seized, only 116 were seized on the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the third, and the remaining two on the fourth. Of the 55 that were not successfully seized, 31 were pecked at only once, 10 twice, 10 three times, 3 four times and 1 five times. I fancy one would find that adult fowls would show by no means a perfect record. So long as chicks with ten days’ experience fail to seize on the first trial 45 per cent of the time, it is hardly fair to argue against the perfection of the instinct on the ground of failures to seize during the first day.
The chick’s practical appreciation of space-facts is seen further in his attempts to escape when confined. Put chicks only twenty or thirty hours old in a box with walls three or four inches high and they will react to the perpendicularity of the confining walls by trying to jump over them. In fact, in the ways he moves, the directions he takes and the objects he reacts to, the chicken has prior to experience the power of appropriate reaction to colors and facts of all three dimensions.